


Prüfung: earth, after rain

by sevendials



Category: Weiss Kreuz
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Gen, M/M, Strong Language
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-06-21
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-20 15:17:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 81,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/214139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevendials/pseuds/sevendials
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tainted drugs, a missing target, a stranger collapsing in the street. Three separate points - and searching for the lines that connect them takes Weiss off the books and into a whole world of danger. Rewrite of 'Seuche', contains dark and mature themes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mädchen: In plain sight

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: _Weiss Kreuz_ and all associated characters and assets remain the property of Kyoko Tsuchiya, Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiss, TV Tokyo, Movic and any other individuals or companies whom I may have inadvertently left out. This is a fan work from which no profit is being made or will be made, written solely for the amusement of anyone who may wish to read it and of course myself, as it’s author.
> 
> Acknowledgements: Thanks to pichi for shining light into the dark, uncharted wilderness of my first draft and to Rokesmith for providing me with a map, listening to me talk, and generally putting up with far more than any man should have to. Thank you, too, to everyone who read this fanfic in its original form, and to everyone who’s taking a chance on the redraft.
> 
> Author’s Notes: Several years in the making, this fic started out as precisely two plot points. The need to provide a framework for them to hang in resulted in this. Formerly posted as Seuche, I came to the conclusion that I was never going to finish the story if I didn’t go back and fix the issues I had with the original opening – and decided in the process to fix everything else I didn’t think quite worked any more, starting with the title and working from there. The amendations, or so I like to believe, are both self-evident if you know the original and largely self-explanatory, so I won’t go on about them here. Suffice to say that though the plot and the themes are all very similar, there’ve been some changes made.
> 
> Warnings: Strong language; slash; canon-appropriate levels of violence; dark and mature themes.

If it hadn't been for Takanori's party, she never would have heard of the pills.

Sayu Tanemura had never, in the truest sense of the word, ever exactly been _fat_. She just hadn't been Mizuki, that was all, but that had been quite enough. Sure, her face was a shade prettier and she had the paler complexion, and Mizuki, poor thing, wore glasses. But Mizuki was a gymnast; she was lithe and willowy and long-limbed, with a slender waist and all her body in elegant proportion with itself. There was an easy, effortless grace about her that had left Sayu feeling gigantic beside her, awkward as a buffalo who’d made friends with a gazelle.

At first, she hadn't really noticed it. Then it had merely irked her. It wasn't like Mizuki was doing it on purpose – but that wasn't the problem, it wasn't the point. The point was Sayu had never had Mizuki's figure and, or so she had started to fear, she never would. Wouldn't even come close.

Then Takanori invited them both to his eighteenth.

Takanori. Takanori Katou, whose attention she had been desperately, hopelessly trying to catch since – God, it must have been since first year. Takanori she'd thought for sure didn't know she existed, still less what she was called. And _he_ had invited her to his eighteenth birthday! She was thrilled, she was overflowing with sudden hope, she was scared silly – it was a sign, Sayu thought, it _had_ to be a sign...

It could have been perfect, if only Mizuki hadn't been going too. Slim, elegant Mizuki, showing off those long, tanned limbs in a wild little dress... a guy like Takanori Katou wouldn't look twice at dumpy little Sayu Tanemura, would he? Not if she walked in next to a girl like Mizuki—

"Sayu-chan, aren't you hungry?"  
"What? Oh... no, no. I'm fine."

So she'd started dieting. Started avoiding the suddenly far-too-inquisitive Mizuki, at least during lunch. The girl ate like a horse anyway, it was kind of gross really, and terribly unfair that she never seemed to get fat. Much better to hang round with Anko Hasegawa from 3-A. Anko was always dieting, she was famous for it – and it had been Anko who had told her about the pills.

By the night of the party she had dropped a dress size. A new outfit, new high-heeled shoes to help lengthen her too-short legs and Sayu was walking tall, and if all the boys' heads didn't exactly turn to stare at her as she strode proudly in, the looks that were turned her way were still more than she'd have got a month ago! It was all she could do to keep herself from smiling too much as she wove her way through the knots of friends and classmates over to Takanori and she'd never have had the nerve to do that before, not back when she was fat.

"You weren't fat," Mizuki had told her, but Sayu wasn't listening.

She'd sworn, of course, that the pills were a temporary measure. The kind of thing desperate full-time dieters like Anko Hasegawa resorted to. Anko was already hoarding her change for another, completely different miracle cure, telling herself that this was the one, this time it had to work – but Sayu wasn't like that, was she? She was different, she was sensible, all she wanted was to go down a dress size, or maybe two. Once the party was over, Sayu had told herself, she would stop: but by then it had become a habit.

Sayu was thin now, as thin as Mizuki. The pills kept their promise. Mama had fussed, of course, to see how she was letting her meals go: her irritation became outright anger and, finally, pleas. Sayu ignored them all. She zipped up her little school skirt, she smiled at the slim, pretty girl in the mirror. Takanori had camera club tonight, which was just too bad, but they'd have all Saturday to make up for it. Maybe Mizuki would go shopping with her...

If there were strange aches in her joints and her head hurt sometimes, if it was getting harder to make herself get up in the mornings, who cared? Sayu ate less, exercised more, it didn't have to mean anything was wrong. How could there be anything wrong? Anyway, a headache pill cured it.

Mama, Mizuki – they all worried too much. Life was sweet, and her new beauty cheap at the price.


	2. Fremder: Small beginnings

“Have you seen Youji-kun?”

Autumn in the city. Two hours after sunrise on a blindingly bright morning, yet there was a lingering chill to the air as Omi Tsukiyono stepped from the _Koneko no Sumu Ie_ , half-lost behind the pot of absurdly bushy and verdant bamboo he held clasped tightly to his chest. Stepping onto the pavement, he shivered slightly – was it meant to be this cold? It hadn’t _looked_ it – and wondered for a moment if it was worth going back for his sweater. Probably not. It would warm up soon enough and he wouldn’t be out here that long.

Just inside the store Ken Hidaka, re-arranging pots of Dutch hyacinths on one of the shelves, looked up at the sound of the boy’s voice, stepping over to the doorway and shielding his eyes from the sun.

“That you behind there, Omi?” he asked, trying, without much success, to keep back a grin.  
“Of course,” Omi replied seriously, peering out from around the side of the plant. Then, “What’s so funny?”  
“Well, you might wanna put that down. It’s like talking to a tree.”  
Omi glared at him, a meaningless gesture coming from a boy half-hidden behind a bamboo plant. “You could help instead of making silly remarks.”  
“What’s the point?” Ken asked. “You’re practically done now.”  
“Oi, _Ken_ -kun!”  
“Well, you could’ve left it to me,” Ken said with a shrug. “Ain’t like I’d have minded…”

Omi sighed, gently setting the bamboo down in its usual spot and why wouldn’t someone _buy_ the stupid thing and take it off their hands? Carrying that thing out every day was getting ridiculous. He straightened, dusted off his hands; he glanced over at Ken, eyes thoughtful.

“So… have you seen him?”  
Ken had turned back to the hyacinths, but he raised his head at Omi’s question. Oh, yeah… “Youji? No.” No, he hadn’t and he wasn’t, by the look on his face, even remotely surprised. Irritated, Hell yeah, irritated he could do but _surprised_? Not really. It was, Omi knew, just Youji being Youji and not even Ken thought it worth getting annoyed about any more, for all that he probably was. “He was off out last thing I knew.”  
“Meeting someone?”  
“It’s Youji,” Ken said. “Of course he’s with someone. If he’d struck out he’d be back by now, right?”

Sighing and nodding, Omi headed back into the store to pick up another pot plant. It wasn’t exactly as if it was unlike Youji to vanish off by himself in the evenings, irritating though it could undoubtedly be. Still, it was a good sign Youji was acting rather more like himself. The guy had been in quite the slump lately and no wonder what with everything he’d been through in the last few months, after the whole _Neu_ mess… Ken could relate to that and rather wished he couldn’t: Omi thought it was no wonder Youji had been feeling low.

Aya hadn’t been round all morning either, but Omi knew from long experience that it really wasn’t worth getting too worked up over where the redhead had got to. Like Youji, Aya would show up; he always did. He wasn’t always around first thing in the morning and that was only a problem when his occasional absences happened to coincide with Youji’s far-more-frequent ones. At least Aya was generally on time for his shifts…

Omi suspected Aya took himself off for the sake of a little space and if he’d gone somewhere this morning no doubt he, like Youji, had his reasons for it. Aya Fujimiya had always possessed the air of a man with a lot on his mind – even the knowledge that his sister was out there somewhere, alive and well and picking up the dropped threads of her own interrupted life, couldn’t have altered that. And Aya wasn’t the kind who appreciated people intruding, no matter how good their intentions, into his private circumstances. He was definitely getting easier to know, though, unless it was that Omi was getting used to him. It could always have been that, he supposed.

“You’d think he’d be back by now, though,” Omi said as he stepped out of the shop again, a rather smaller pot plant in his arms this time. “He didn’t say he was going to be out all night, did he?”  
“No… Aya’s not round either,” Ken replied, unconsciously echoing Omi’s thoughts.  
“Aya-kun? I’d guess he wanted a bit of fresh air, or something like that. He’s been kind of preoccupied lately.”  
“Stop the presses,” Ken said. “Aya’s preoccupied, the Pope’s still a Catholic and _bears_ still—”  
“Be nice, Ken-kun. It’s not his fault he’s— oh.”

He broke off, looked up: a girl was calling to him, and as he caught sight of her she waved. Nene by the looks of it, with dark-haired Miyuki and a couple of other girls he recognized by sight if not by name: the morning rush was beginning.

Omi scanned the shop floor, taking in the displays of flowers standing on the paving, the arrangements in their display cases, Ken, turning one or two of the hyacinths he had been putting out so their better sides were showing. The shop was ready enough, he supposed. There were still one or two things to do but they could wait a while. Perhaps Youji would do them when he got back – no, probably not. Aya, then…

“Ken-kun, the autumn rose arrangement down there… it’s looking a little tired. Can you see that gets replaced?”  
“Huh? Oh… yeah, sure thing.”

A few minutes later, with four girls in trim high-school uniforms admiring the cut flowers and pretending to be utterly unable to make up their minds, Aya walked quickly up into the store and ducked into the storeroom to retrieve his apron. He didn’t reply to Omi’s cheery ‘Good morning’, but that would have been rather too much to expect. That was just Aya’s way and Omi had long ago stopped really noticing it, still less taking offense. Ken, on the other hand—

“And good morning to you, too!” Ken called after him.

Oops. Omi winced slightly, an awkward smile flickering across his face. He really wouldn’t have liked to be Youji, when he got back.

When Aya stepped back into the shop a few moments later, hands behind his back as he fastened the ties of his apron, he looked neat and composed as always, and alert as a man who had been up for hours. A bold eighteen-year-old with her hair in a ponytail gave him a frankly flirtatious smile, another girl turned to whisper something to her friend; Ken, apparently determined to be annoyed at _someone_ this morning, gave him another irritated glance. Omi smiled helplessly at Aya over his shoulder, and wasn’t at all surprised when Aya contrived to ignore that, too.

“Where’s Youji?” Aya asked in lieu of any greeting.  
Ken shrugged. “Don’t ask me. Out’s all I know.”  
“He’ll turn up, Aya-kun,” Omi said comfortingly. “He always does.”

But he still wasn’t back by the time Omi started to get ready to leave. Aya was dealing, in his usual coldly competent way, with a blushing brunette who giggled every time he spoke though he was doing nothing more compromising than asking whether or not she wished to have her narcissi wrapped while Ken seemed to have become entangled with another, more persistent schoolgirl who was claiming to possess an almost pathological interest in Dutch hyacinths. Thankfully, he himself was largely unoccupied: good thing too, as a glance at his watch told him it was time for him to head off to classes himself.

Which was when he saw the girl. She was on the sidewalk with a group of others, standing slightly to the rear with her hands clasped behind her back. At this distance he couldn’t really make out her face – her head was slightly bowed and her blue-black curls fell into her eyes, obscuring them – but from what he could see her complexion was pale, almost as pale as Aya’s, and her features were small, even and surprisingly expressive.

Something about her seemed strangely familiar.

“Ken-kun?” Omi caught at his teammate’s sleeve, interrupting his diplomatic attempts to find out whether the girl with the fondness for hyacinths was fond enough of them to consider buying one.  
“Sorry, one moment?” Ken said to the girl, then looked over at Omi. “What is it?” He didn’t seem annoyed by the interruption; there was only so much he could find to say about caring for hyacinths before starting to repeat himself.  
“Do you think she looks a bit like Ouka?” He asked, gesturing toward the girl he had spotted.  
Ken blinked, picking the girl Omi had indicated out of the crowd. “Ouka? Well… maybe a little,” he said, then laughed briefly. “Omi, she’s got her head down. Even if she did I couldn’t tell from here.”  
“You can’t?”  
Ken smiled apologetically. “Sorry.”  
“Don’t worry about it. Ken-kun, your customer’s waiting.”

Ken nodded, then turned back to the hyacinth fancier and, as Omi unfastened his own apron and left the shop floor, he could hear Ken apologizing to her. He probably shouldn’t have interrupted, but… he supposed he had just been startled by the sight of the girl, but by the sounds of things, Ken hadn’t seen the resemblance. Maybe he was seeing what he wanted. Maybe there was just nothing to see…

When he came back down, carrying his bag and his crash helmet, Omi scanned the groups of schoolgirls from the comparative safety of the shop. He had wanted to take another look at the girl who had reminded him so strangely of Ouka, but he was disappointed; he couldn’t see her anywhere. He supposed she and her friends must have left while he was collecting his bag. Oh, well. Probably that was no bad thing either.

Shrugging off the odd feeling that seeing a familiar stranger had given him, Omi hurried from the store and out into the morning-crowded streets, his mind already on the day to come.  
____

“Well, _damn_.”

Some days a guy knows he’s in for it before his feet hit the floor: today, for Youji Kudou, was going to be one of them. Waking with the sun on his face, he had shaded his eyes from the glare with one hand as he squinted down at his watch in search of nothing more than confirmation of what he already knew: he was late. So late it almost wasn’t worth doing anything about it, so late he might as well have rolled over and gone back to sleep. Still, oversleeping, or so Youji Kudou supposed, kind of came with the whole voluptuous package and some things it was worth being late over.

He sat up, stifled a yawn, raked his tangled hair from his face and held it there as he gazed about himself, making a hopeful grab for orientation. Where was he anyway? A hotel bedroom, that much was obvious, but which hotel? Not the Nikko, he knew that place by now. Of course he _could_ always check the matches, but that felt almost like cheating.

He’d known he shouldn’t have let himself fall asleep.

Well, silver linings: the woman had done no better. She was still asleep, limbs warm and heavy, a small smile playing on lips that still bore the stain of last night’s deep, dark lipstick. She’d been different last night, more austere. Beautiful, but strict; the suit she had been wearing (expensive and, if Youji was any judge, tailored) only added to the impression.

But now she was sleeping, and asleep she was a stranger again. With her features relaxed and her eyes – and _God_ but she had intriguing eyes, sharp and dark and acquisitive, the eyes of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and last night it had been him – now gently closed, she seemed younger than before. How old was she? Hard to tell and, with some women, the question never arose. Older than him, of course, but a guy tired fast of giggly co-eds.

For form’s sake Youji half-considered tugging his clothes on and leaving, but… he looked at the watch again. Hey, he was late already; might as well be late in comfort and style. Finding time for a wash and brush-up wouldn’t make much of a difference. Besides, it’d be nice to take a leisurely shower and not have to worry about Ken bitching him out after for using up all the hot water. Getting out of bed, he picked up his discarded clothes and padded quietly into the bathroom, pushing his hair from his eyes again and yawning as he closed the door softly behind him, taking a quick look at himself in the mirror. Did he have a hangover? Bit of one, maybe, but nothing a shower, coffee and a brisk walk couldn’t cure.

The woman was awake when he walked back into the bedroom twenty minutes later, dressed in last night’s pants and vigorously toweling off his honey-blonde hair. The body she’d bared so willingly for him the night before was now concealed beneath a thin hotel robe, her clothing piled beside her on the bed.

“You’re not running late, are you?” Youji asked, letting the towel fall about his neck.  
She looked up at him, pushing her hair from her eyes. “A little, but I’ll get by. You?”  
“Nothing I can’t handle. Want a shower?”  
Thanks.” She smiled. “I’d ask you to wait, but you’ll need to get back.”  
“It’s no problem,” Youji replied, giving her a lazy grin: what kind of a gentleman said ‘okay, sure’ and bolted?  
“Don’t. There’s really no need. I’ve got to get to work anyway.”

She brushed past him and into the bathroom and there was last night’s firmness; she’d put on the self-possessed expression before she’d even reached for that wrap. She was as used to this as he was – no, more so. Well, maybe it was for the best. Besides, he really should be seeing about getting to work himself.

Youji stepped away, listening as the door closed gently behind him, the key scraping in the lock. Discarding the towel, he tugged his shirt back over his head, frowning slightly when the thin fabric caught on a patch of slightly damp skin. He unstuck it and pulled it down, then crossed over to the windows and drew the curtains, looking out across the street. In the bathroom, he could hear water starting to run.

Breakfast would have been nice. They could have found a café, gotten a coffee and a pastry or something… He would have liked to linger over last night’s small romance, take his time about the goodbye, but with a woman like this? No. What would that be to her but needless sentimentality? She was a hard, demanding woman; she had places to be and things to do, she simply wouldn’t see the point of indulging him. She had known what she’d been after – women like that always did – and Youji had been more than willing to provide it. What else was there between them?

Smiling wryly at himself, he headed for the door, stooping to retrieve and pull on his shoes and the lightweight jacket he had worn last night. She was right, at that. There were other things to do…

No goodbye. No explanation. It was clearly what she’d wanted.

Too bad it wasn’t quite what _Youji_ had been after, the solitary walk back to the subway with his mind quite carefully on nothing at all, but diverting though it would have been to walk last night’s Miss Right to work there were still things he had to do, for all the pointlessness of floristry. Like stop Aya glaring him into an early grave for showing up late for one. Ken’s vaguely maternal scolding he could handle, but there was a world of difference between Ken’s reproaches and Aya’s Leveling Death Glares. At least _Ken_ could usually be quite safely ignored…

Idly he lit a cigarette, walking slowly; he stopped for that coffee alone. Well he was hungry, and late enough already for a few minutes more not to make much difference.  
____

The stranger, the girl from this morning, hadn’t exactly been _on his mind_ : Omi wouldn’t have put things that simply. It was merely that it had seemed… well, it was suddenly much harder to file Ouka away as neatly as he had been doing these past few months, that was all.

She wasn’t his cousin. She could never, Omi was sure, have been that; she might, on a second, closer look, not even have looked that much like the girl he had lost but she had made him think of Ouka all the same and the thoughts had left him aching a little, again, with the loss of her. He had daydreamed through the morning’s classes, for all he had nodded and frowned in all the right places; Omi had even made few diligent notes, and yet he had taken nothing in. Lunch had come as a sudden surprise.

“Hey, Tsukiyono! You wanna go eat on the roof?”  
“Actually, I’ve got some reading to do…” Smiling in apology, Omi reached for his bag.  
“Well, suit yourself.”

He wasn’t really hungry anyway, the bento box he’d bought on his way to school lying disregarded at the bottom of his bag. Omi gazed down at the Mathematics textbook he’d spread before him, but he was no more reading it than he’d been concentrating on the intricacies of chiral pool synthesis an hour before. Thoughts of Ouka made it difficult to concentrate – of Ouka, and of the sudden, strange silence—

It was foolish, wasn’t it, to think like that? And yet how could he help but think it? The silence, heavy and unnatural-feeling though it may have been, was nothing to wish away, but the utter lack of anything, since the fall, more serious than the occasional twisted tycoon or politician spilled by too much power seemed, to him, like nothing more than the calm before the storm. If Omi knew nothing else about storms he knew that they broke sooner or later. Nature, after all, abhorred a vacuum. So did men.

It wasn’t the first time he had thought such things. It wasn’t even the first time Omi had caught himself thinking like that at school – and yet, when silence shattered on Mizuki Yoshiya’s scream, he couldn’t help but feel implicated.

“ _Sayu_ -chan!”  
Omi, head snapping upward, slammed the textbook shut. “What’s wrong?”

But as soon as he raised his head he had seen it. Pale, pretty little Sayu Tanemura was doubled over at her desk, eyes wide and both her hands pressed over her mouth, slender fingers smeared with hot, bright red blood. Mizuki, on her feet, stared fixedly at her friend’s hands, another scream – wordless this time – sticking in her throat. Sayu coughed, weak and wet, and a fresh gout of blood spilled over her fingers, dripping down to stain the front of her neat yellow sweater and spattering the desktop. Another girl, not Mizuki, started to scream and this hadn’t been what he meant—

For a moment all Omi could do was stare, transfixed as Mizuki was, as the rest of the little knot of teenagers clustered about Sayu’s desk. A moment, no more, before his training kicked in. _Do something_. Had to _do_ something – but what? Sayu was bleeding from the mouth: what did you _do_ for that?

Omi’s understanding of emergency aid was enviable, but it was also limited. Concussions and sprains, minor burns, wounds to chests or limbs: he knew what to do for them, but that was where his knowledge ended. This was new, this was shocking and weird and _wrong_ , Sayu – his classmate, whose life five minutes ago had been cramming for college exams and planning what to wear this weekend – Sayu was sick, maybe even dying, and Omi didn’t have any idea why! He didn’t even know what he should be doing, and yet everything he had was demanding that he had to.

“I’ll call an ambulance!”

And Omi snatched for his bag, upending it on his desk and scrabbling among his abruptly evicted belongings for his phone, nearly knocking it to the floor in his haste. That at least he could do calmly and know that he was doing right, and yet even as he spoke, his voice clipped and calm as he reduced the girl to nothing but a collection of symptoms, he could almost have imagined he caught the sound of the dispatcher’s indrawn breath. His best wasn’t good enough, and all the doctors and the hospitals in the world could have done Sayu little more.  
____

Half past two on a Wednesday and Ken was bored. He was so bored he was half-considering picking a fight with Youji just to say he was _doing_ something and, at this time of the day and week with customers few and far between, it was probably the best way to kill time he was going to get. The morning rush was long gone; things had picked up a bit round lunchtime but even that hadn’t been enough. That was the problem with shop work. If he wasn’t rushed off his feet he was so bored that having an argument over nothing seemed like a welcome change of pace.

What he wouldn’t give to have just enough to keep himself occupied. Was office work like that? Perhaps it was, but what would he know? All Ken knew about office work was that his dad had been a something incredibly boring for a cement company, and a life of filing cabinets and photocopying had driven Yuriko almost as crazy as being stuck in a florist’s with a coworker who spent most of his time defining and describing inertia was currently driving him…

Ken counted to sixty as slowly as he could bear, then pushed away from the wall he had been leaning on, shooting Youji an aggravated look. “So,” he said, “where the Hell _were_ you earlier?”

Arguing it was.

For a moment Ken thought Youji was going to pretend he hadn’t heard. The man didn’t lift his head, pillowed on one cupped hand; he didn’t open his half-lidded eyes – he just let his gaze drift idly across to Ken, then he smiled slowly and lazily. Even his smile could barely be bothered to try. “I, Kenken,” he said languidly, “was enjoying an evening with an exceptionally beautiful and talented young lady whose name temporarily slips my mind.”

Ken snorted. “You mean you’ve forgotten it.”  
“I mean,” Youji said, “she didn’t feel the need to tell me, and a gentleman never pries where he isn’t wanted.”  
“You spent the whole night with a girl who wouldn’t even tell you her _name_?”  
“A woman,” Youji corrected him. “She was a woman, Ken, not a girl, and you needn’t look so scandalized. I merely spared the lady the necessity of making one up.”  
The necessity of _what_? Ken stared at him. “Why would she want to do that?”  
“Whyever shouldn’t she? Honestly, Hidaka, you have a lot to learn about women of the world.”  
“Why’d you wanna hang round with a woman who wouldn’t tell you her name? Isn’t that kind of weird?”  
“Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. You never know, you might rather enjoy it.”  
Ken flushed angrily; Youji simply smiled again, as if he’d expected absolutely nothing less. “Get _bent_ , Youji, that’s not what I meant and you know it!”  
“Then,” Youji asked, “what did you mean?” and smiled when all Ken did in reply was give him an irritated scowl. “Well, while you think of an answer, I’m going for a cigarette. Mind the store, okay?”

He didn’t wait for Ken’s response, simply pushed away from the counter and, pulling the cigarettes out of his pocket, walked from the store. _Lazy bastard_ , Ken thought, but even in his head the insult lacked bite. Might as well blame the sun for setting, or rainclouds for getting stuff wet.

On the subject of which, he should probably go water the bamboo.

Sometimes Ken almost wished he smoked. Not, he thought as he uncoiled the hose, that he wanted to deal with the expense or all that crap in his lungs, but Youji and Aya had an absolutely brilliant excuse to take way more breaks than he did. All he could do if he wanted five minutes out the shop was volunteer for deliveries or water this stupid bamboo. He stuck the end of the hose in the bamboo’s tub, then bent to turn on the tap.

He’d finished with the bamboo and had moved on to deal with a couple of smaller plants when he caught sight of the woman. Ken didn’t notice her becauseshe was female; he’d never been much of a one for that. What he saw was a break in the pattern. Simply, she moved wrong: a woman, hunched over, staggering as if she were ill or if her feet hurt.

He nearly said something then, but managed to stop himself. Maybe she was upset and just wanted to be left alone, or maybe she walked like that all the time and would be offended if he pointed out that she looked like she needed to sit down… either way, it was basically none of his business. Shrugging, Ken turned back to his plants, very scrupulously concentrating on the play of the water over the leaves as the woman stumbled past him, head lowered, gaze fixed on her own feet. Nope, I wasn’t staring at you just then, really. You have a nice day now, I’ll just… I’m gonna be watering these plants. Yup.

“Excuse me.”

Ken started, and very nearly dropped the hose. He’d been so convinced that the woman really _didn’t_ want him to get involved that to actually have her talk to him left him totally wrong-footed.

“Huh?” He turned, and the look on his face was slightly guilty, as if the woman – and she wasn’t much more than a girl really, she was barely older than he was – had caught him doing something he shouldn’t be. “I, uh… can I help?”  
“Please.” The girl swallowed, running her tongue across her lips. “I… where is this?”  
Ah, she’s _lost_. That made sense of her. No wonder she’d been walking so slow. “Oh… Shibuya,” Ken said, “about ten minutes from the station. Were you looking for the park or something?”

She said nothing. She swallowed again, took a step toward him, seeming to stumble slightly; almost instinctively, he backed off a pace. How long, Ken wondered, had this girl been lost for?

“Hey,” Ken said. And “Are you okay?”

The girl’s shoulders sagged; she stumbled again, falling forward. Ken dropped the hose.

Caught the girl beneath the arms, staggering backward as she slumped against him, nearly pitched off his feet by the sudden weight of her body against his chest. Her eyes, when he gazed down at her face, were closed, her breathing ragged and if it had been a few hours later, Ken would have presumed that the girl was simply drunk. Now, stood in the middle of the sidewalk with the fallen hose spattering water across the dusty paving, struggling to keep the both of them on their

“Youji!” he shouted. “ _Hey_ , Youji!”

No answer. The girl’s lashes fluttered, her loose, untidy hair brushed ticklishly against his throat; Ken gave it about half a minute before her dead weight combined with his awkward position landed the both of them on the ground, and that was before he caught his foot in the coils of the hose. Great. Just fantastic. Now what?

He was just starting to wonder if he really _was_ going to drop her when Youji sauntered into view around the corner, hands in pockets, cigarette smoldering between his lips. His eyebrows raised when he caught sight of Ken struggling with the woman, the corners of his lips quirking into a wry smile: Youji seemed, almost, to be hesitating on the verge of laughter and what the Hell was _he_ so amused about? If it hadn’t been for the semi-conscious stranger slumping in his arms Ken thought he’d have tried to punch the bastard.

“Why, Kenken,” he said, calm and casual as a summer evening, “I didn’t think you had it in you…”  
On second thoughts, maybe he still would. “For God’s sake, Kudou! She’s gonna collapse!”

Not that he’d needed to tell Youji _that_. Stepping forward, Youji gently took the fainting girl’s shoulders and, setting his own arm about her to stop her from falling, pulled her away from Ken. Ken straightened, heaving a sigh of relief, and kicked the hose from his ankle, stooping to pick it up. He was about to head over to the faucet to turn it off, but the sight of Youji and the girl gave him pause.

“Is she gonna be okay?”  
“I think,” Youji said cautiously, “she’s worn herself out. What exactly happened?”  
Ken shrugged. “Beats me. She asked me where we were, then she kinda just… keeled over. Has she fainted?”  
“I don’t think so. Her eyes are open. I’m going to sit her down. Can you go get a glass of water?”  
“Water?” Ken blinked. “Well… okay, if you think it’ll help.”

When Youji didn’t protest Ken hurried back into the shop, turning the hose off on his way past, and why people always thought a glass of water was such a universal cure he hadn’t the faintest idea. If the girl had been in better shape, he’d have thought that Youji just wanted him out the way for a few minutes...

Aya was in the shop, propping up the counter and glaring at nothing in particular, though that very quickly changed to ‘glaring at Ken’ as the boy cautiously pushed open the door. No doubt he’d spent the last few minutes cursing both his teammates by turn for their absence, never mind that he’d spent half the afternoon hiding in the stockroom very slowly assembling display arrangements they hadn’t even needed. Ken gave him a quick, anxious grin, hurrying past him and out into the break room – can’t stop now, Aya, very busy being busy – in search of a cup.

“What are you doing?”  
Oh, great, Aya’d followed him. “Oh,” he said distractedly, all his attention on the mug he was filling, “nothing much. Youji wanted a glass of water.”  
“And he couldn’t get it himself?”  
Ken scowled at him. “He’s busy. You know, _work_? Did you want something, Aya?”

The look on Aya’s face said he had his doubts – had serious, serious doubts – that whatever Youji wanted with a glass of water was work-related. Ken told that look to go fuck itself and it ain’t like _your_ work ethic is any better Fujimiya now will you please get the hint and go watch the store?

Of course he didn’t. “What’s going on, Ken?”  
“Nothing,” Ken said. “Just a girl’s feeling kind of funny and Youji thought it’d help if I got her a drink.”

And he had tried to make it sound as uninteresting as possible, but when Ken left the shop again and hurried back to the girl’s side, the mug he had slightly overfilled slopping water over the side of his hand, Aya was following, a pale and patient shadow. They made it back onto the pavement just in time to see Youji, crouching by the side of the chair he had settled the girl in, straightening and lifting his hand from her brow. Ken raised his eyes heavenward: if you’re there, God, grant me the strength not to punch this idiot…

Then the girl raised her head, chest heaving, breath hitching in her throat as her eyes focused and she gazed around herself, and Ken pushed that thought aside. Youji would just have to wait.

“Are you okay?” Youji asked, and even he was stepping back to give the girl some space.  
She nodded, or tried to. “I’m—” A single word, and her voice broke on it. She sounded hoarse, hoarser even than Ken remembered, and her hand, when she raised it to push her hair from her face, trembled.  
“Don’t push it,” Ken said. “You nearly fainted back there. The heat getting to you?”

The girl nodded again, quick and anxious, an unsteady, yet still grateful smile flickering on her lips: something about that smile had Ken raising his brows, trading a look with Aya. _Did you just_ … Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Youji shoot the redhead a glance. Yes, they’d just. Whatever it was had been there, the others had seen it too.

Youji grinned. “Yeah, I thought it was something like that. Gotta say though, you gave Ken quite a shock! He’s not used to having that effect on women…”  
The girl stifled a giggle; Ken didn’t. “You’re _not_ funny, Youji!”  
“Yeah, yeah… gimme the water, Ken.”

Well, he wasn’t going to argue with _that_. Ken nodded and (sorry, it’s a bit full) handed the mug over, watching Youji as he watched the girl lifting it to her lips, drinking, swallowing, drinking again. Her hands were shaking so badly that Youji reached out and steadied the mug for her and it was that, the tremor in her hands, that had Ken starting to frown. Dehydration. He’d _seen_ this. Seen it in his teammates – his other teams, that was, way back when – he saw it even now sometimes if one of the kids pushed himself too far, but not this bad. He never let it get this bad, nobody with any sense did. Jesus, this did not look good…

“Youji,” he said, and he sounded anxious, “are you sure this is such a great idea?”  
“Huh? What’d you mean?”  
“She’s dehydrated,” Ken said. “Bad. Plain water ain’t going to help. I’ve got some isotonic sports crap in the fridge, I’ll go get… no, I’ll go call someone. We can’t deal with this.”  
“Ken?” Youji said. And, “Isn’t that a bit of an overreaction?”  
“Fuck off, Kudou! I’ve _seen_ this shit, she needs a _doctor_!” __  
“He’s right, Youji.” Aya, breaking his silence. “A doctor could help her far better than we can.”  
The girl stiffened, eyes going wide. “No,” she said softly. “ _No_. Please don’t worry. I just felt faint.” She sipped the water, shuddering slightly as she swallowed, and if that had been intended to reassure Ken she was feeling fine, it failed.  
“Really.” It wasn’t a question. Aya didn’t sound like he quite believed that.  
She nodded, and even that looked desperate. “I’m fine. Really, I’m fine! Don’t put yourselves out, I just…” she broke off, swallowing. “I just want to go home.”  
“Home?” Ken echoed. “Don’t you know where that is?  
“I’ve only just come here,” the girl said softly. “I was meant to be staying with a friend, but…” she hesitated, as if she were trying to work out what she should say next. “… but I got off the train at the wrong station. I thought I could just find my way to the other one, but I didn’t… it’s much bigger here than I was used to. So I got lost.”

She’s lying.

Ken looked over at Youji again, brows drawing sharply downward. He didn’t know how he knew this girl was lying; he didn’t even understand why she’d _want_ to. All he knew was that he _did_ – and, from the glance that Youji shot back at him, his friend knew it too.

“But—”

But nothing. She was fine, absolutely _fine_ and what did it matter that people who were feeling absolutely fine didn’t make a habit of damn near passing out from thirst and exhaustion in the middle of the street? No, she didn’t want an ambulance or to see a doctor; she didn’t even seem to want the isotonic drink Ken had thrust into her hands and the damndest thing was that he had no idea why she was insisting on that, either. She just wouldn’t and that was the end of it: I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay…

She wasn’t even fooling herself, yet what the Hell were they supposed to say to someone so determined she needed nothing? In the end all the three of them could do for the girl was see she got home, and even that she had looked like she was about to argue over.

“If you’ll just point me toward the station—”  
“You almost _fainted_!”  
“Ken, if it’s what she’s comfortable with…”

It was _stupid_ was what it was, but there was nothing else they could do. Shaking his head and muttering darkly to himself, Ken walked back into the store to call the girl a cab, hastily jotting down her friend’s address – a girl called Shizue living in Sumida, not far from Oshiage station – on the back of the order book for no more reason than it was the closest thing to hand, before reaching for the phone book. For a moment, he had half-considered calling her an ambulance anyway, but he hadn’t. He’d taken it out on the phone’s touchpad instead and if it only made him feel better for a moment, at least it had made him feel better.

Ken almost went back outside to wait for the cab when the call was over but, hesitating with one hand resting on the phone’s receiver, he glanced out of the window to catch Youji bending to the girl, making her laugh – and he thought, _no, better not_. Youji could handle it, and he was welcome to it.  
____

There was blood on his hands, warm and reeking of iron and, as it dried, growing sticky to the touch. There was blood on his clothes, spattered red on red on the front of his sweater. It smeared his face, his skin scored with a streak of it where he had reached up to push the hair from his eyes: his cheeks pale and sweat-damp, his hands shaking, it had been all Omi could do to convince the hospital staff he was in no danger himself.

They had been too late. They would always have been too late.

Hurried into the ambulance and from there into the ER, Omi had pretended shock. Silent, wide-eyed, he had let the nurses guide him into a cubicle, press a paper cup full of chalky, too-warm water into his hands, along with a pair of tiny white pills he had pretended to hurriedly swallow, then palmed. Better that they thought him lost, trapped just out of reach in the sanctuary of his own shock. What else would they have expected from a high-school boy who had seen his classmate bleeding to death in front of him?

The nurses, he couldn’t help but notice even as they led him away, hadn’t been surprised by Sayu’s condition. A high-school girl collapses bleeding for no reason at all – and by the looks in their eyes, by the way they shook their heads and murmured over her unconscious, blanket-swathed form, the ER staff had seen it all before.

_Looks like we’ve got another bleeder._  
_Oh, Christ, not this again…_

And then they had left him alone. Left alone, Omi had placed the paper cup down on a side table, sprung sudden and noiseless to his feet and crept over to the curtain, head cocked, listening intently. Sayu was just down the corridor. If he could just—

“Sayu Tanemura. High-school student, seventeen years old, no known allergies, blood type unknown. Collapsed in her classroom with uncontrollable PO bleed—”  
“BP 82 over 38, heart rate 147, query systemic shock—”  
“Any response?”  
“None. Okuda, call the OR, get them on standby – where the Hell’s the anesthetist, why hasn’t someone bleeped the fucking _anesthetist_?”  
“I did, doctor, as soon as she got here.”  
“Well, bleep him again! Tell him it’s urgent—!”

Clipped, urgent voices, voices full of tension and of fear, suddenly lost beneath the sound of ampoules rattling on a trolley and a bubble of chatter concerning a salaryman found near-collapse in a corner office. Omi resented him for getting in Sayu’s way, then immediately felt terrible for it and hoped that the man got better. The footsteps faded, the rattling trolley pushed away – but then a brisk, compact woman bustled her way over to his cubicle and Omi sprung guiltily back into his chair. He sat hastily back down as she pushed open the curtain and hurried to his side, one hand steadying a blood pressure machine.

“Sit down,” she said, and for all she smiled and spoke quite politely Omi knew it for an order. “I’m Nurse Kasaoka. I’m going to need to take some observations. Are you Tanemura-san’s friend?” Omi nodded, bowing his head almost in spite of himself – yes, that was him – and saw her smile grow kindly. “I understand this is upsetting, but try not to worry, all right? Your friend is in good hands.”  
Omi nodded again, swallowing. She had said nothing about Sayu being okay – perhaps she simply wasn’t allowed to. “I know,” he managed, and even in his own head his voice sounded choked and strange, hardly like his own at all. And, “Thank you.”  
“I’m sure,” Nurse Kasaoka said, “you don’t have to thank me. Can I ask you to roll up your sleeve?”

Mechanically, Omi obeyed. Roll up your sleeve, open your mouth, hold this beneath your tongue, and it was as much a routine to him as it was to the white-clad woman who walked him through it. All the while he listened to the low, urgent voices of Sayu’s doctors and the squeak of the anesthetist’s shoes on the linoleum, and a machine chiming stridently over and over as if to remind them all – as if they could have forgotten! – that things were bad, very bad—

She would live for another hour, two at the outside. For all her doctors fought to save her, for all the drips and drugs and units of blood, they had come too late by far.

Sayu Tanemura was already dead.


	3. Ahnung: Sowing a storm

" _Moth_?" Ken pulled a face, unsure he'd pronounced the English word correctly. Unsure Youji had done. "That's never her real name."  
"Of course it isn't," Youji said, as if it should have been obvious. "But—" using his teeth, he pulled a cigarette from the pack he was holding, "Kenken— that was what she said she was  _called_."  
"Who the Hell goes around calling themselves  _Moth_?" Ken protested. "It's not even like she's foreign! Is she?"  
"No, she isn't." Youji's Zippo flickered and flamed briefly as he lit his cigarette with, to Ken's eyes, an entirely needless flourish. "But you know girls, Hidaka. Or you  _should_  by now. She wouldn't be the first to give herself a silly foreign name because she thought it sounded cute. I knew a girl—"  
"Of course you did, Youji."  
"I knew a girl swore up and down her name was Carmilla…"

A key scraped in the back door's lock, the door creaked open, slammed shut, and there was the sound of footsteps in the passageway. Omi was home, dropping his helmet and his bag at the foot of the stairs, walking into the shop, but it wasn't that which had Youji breaking off, a startled look in normally-lazy green eyes and saw a greeting –  _hi, Omi_  or  _how was school_  or anything at all – dying on Ken's lips. Even Aya lifted his head, taken aback.

Omi, a small, almost delicate figure framed in the stockroom door, hadn't made a sound, but everything about him demanded attention sure as a sudden scream. His face was pale, almost pinched, his eyes were cold and determined and his clothes and skin were spattered with grim, copper stains that could only have been dried blood.

Ken found his voice first. "Christ! Are you okay?"  
"I'm not hurt." Omi's voice was tight as his features, a small, cold, composed thing that spoke only of his own hard-repressed anger. "If you don't mind, there's something I need to look into."  
"I'm going to help," Ken said, quick and unthinking. "Let me…"  
"What," Aya said suddenly, "exactly happened?"  
"Sayu-san's dead," was all Omi said. "I'm going to take a bath."

And with that he was turning away, vanishing back through the door and starting up the stairs, breaking into a run before he was more than halfway up the first flight. Almost instinctively Ken started after him, one hand raised as if to try and catch the boy by the arm.

" _Omi_ —"  
"Leave him be, Ken," Aya cautioned him.

And Ken stopped short. Though he spared Aya an aggrieved look, he had to acknowledge he saw the logic of it. Much as he hated to admit it, Aya's hunches on how to handle situations like this often turned out to be correct and most likely Omi really  _wouldn't_  have appreciated the company. Sighing and shaking his head, Ken settled for closing the door behind his friend, controlled and quiet as an undertaker.

"Who's Sayu?" he asked.  
"Probably a classmate," Youji said quietly.  
"Well,  _shit_." Ken gave the door a quick, irritable kick. "And I guess Omi must have seen it."  
At that, Youji's lips quirked. He looked as if he wanted to make some arch remark – Ken guessed it was only for the sake of the dead girl that he refrained. "Must have been a car accident or something," he said almost experimentally, as if he were testing how the words felt on his tongue, as if even he didn't quite believe in what he was saying. "Damn, that poor girl…"  
"Must have," Ken said uncertainly. Well, sure it must've been an accident, but – something about this didn't feel right. "I guess he'll tell us later, when he's ready?"

But, three hours later, when he knocked on Omi's door with a tea tray in his arms, Ken was still none the wiser and beginning to lose patience with the waiting game. Leaving Youji slumped in front of  _Tombstone_  and Aya cloistered in his bedroom doing whatever it was Aya did alone in rooms, Ken had gone to the kitchen to make tea, then to Omi, the tea tray serving as peace offering and shield all at once.

"Omi? Can I come in?"  
For a moment Ken heard nothing, and he frowned at the door – was everything okay in there? – but then there was a sudden flurry of movement, and then the sound of Omi's voice saying, "All right."

Ken smiled in relief, and nudged open the door with his foot.

He was hardly sure what he'd expected Omi to be doing. It wasn't exactly as if Ken had expected the kid to be in tears or anything – Omi was a tough guy, they all knew that – but he'd been imagining… well, something more contemplative than what he'd ultimately opened the door on. What he'd got was Omi sat on his bed hunched over his laptop, fingers flying over the keys and a stack of printouts and floppy discs scattered over his sheets and piled carelessly on the nightstand. It would only have needed a few textbooks lying about for it to look for all the world as if Omi was buried in a term paper. Without them? It looked like he was planning a mission.

Curious, Ken set the tea tray down on Omi's mercifully uncluttered desk and reached for the nearest printout. He skimread it quickly, frowning in concentration: it was an article, by the looks of it from a medical journal. Fighting through the thickets of needlessly incomprehensible medicalese, Ken realized that the story was about some strange new illness, some weird hemorrhagic  _thing_  that had suddenly started killing Tokyo schoolgirls…

"Is this about Freude?" he asked.  
"Freude?" Omi's head snapped up; he blinked, momentarily thrown, though whether it was by the question or Ken's presence Ken wouldn't have liked to try to guess. "You mean that health drink? No, this is a new thing. This is very, very new… sit down, okay? I'll show you."

Ken nodded, first handing Omi his tea and damn whether or not Omi actually wanted any, then dropping down onto the couch He settled in a comfortable adolescent slouch, his own mug held in both hands, and turned to look at his friend. Only totally serious.

"Is this about… you know, what happened?"  
"Sayu-san," Omi said tightly. "Yes. This is about what happened to her. And by the looks of it, she wasn't the first."

It had started, as best as Omi could find out, just over a month ago. There'd been a seemingly inexplicable rash of sudden deaths in the Tokyo metropolitan area, mostly of young women and teenage girls, but there'd been confirmed cases in older women and men, too. The victims, most of whom were otherwise in good general health, typically presented to clinics and ERs with sudden and uncontrollable internal bleeding, discovered on autopsy to have been caused by rupture of major blood vessels or organs. Surgical repair of the ruptures proved almost impossible due to the general damage to the body tissues, which had become friable and difficult to suture: the victims, almost without exception, died within 48 hours from blood loss and shock.

"Yuck," Ken said. "What's wrong with these guys,  _Ebola_?"  
"That's the strange part, Ken-kun. This isn't contagious."  
"It isn't?"  
Omi shook his head. "If it was hemorrhagic fever, we'd all know about it by now."  
"So if it's not a disease," Ken asked, "then what the Hell  _is_  it?"  
"The best theory so far is it's some kind of tainted drug. Specifically, this."

Omi hit a couple of keys to call up a browser window, then turned the laptop to allow Ken to see. It showed an online advertisement: a purple-on-white banner showing a slender, pretty young woman holding a box of pills, and a line or two of purple characters – see results fast, it really works! If the thing had shown up on top of a movie review or an email inbox, Ken wouldn't have thought anything of it. It looked like any other banner ad, like something a guy noticed without really seeing.

"It's called Charme," Omi said. "It's sold as an appetite suppressant and there's nothing all that unusual about it, except that a lot of the victims' families reported that they'd been taking it for months. Most appetite suppressants are only really effective for a few weeks. The theory so far is that in the short term it worked like every other diet pill, but the victims became addicted and it was long-term use that did all the harm."  
Ken frowned again. "Who'd bother, though? That seems like a lotta effort for not much payout." God knew there were quicker ways to kill.  
"That's the issue," Omi said, taking a sip of tea. "But whatever the reason, it looks like we'll have a new mission soon."  
____

It took less than a week for Omi's theory to be proved correct. A slow Saturday morning with the sun skulking half-heartedly behind thin veils of clouds, and the store had barely been open for an hour before a familiar woman strode through the door as if she had far more right to be there than Weiss themselves did and, who knew, in her mind maybe that was only how things were. Red corkscrew curls, a tight, neat little suit, long legs still recklessly bared and to Hell with the turning of the seasons: Manx, serene and self-assured as ever.

Ken, a plant mister in one hand, raised his head; he glanced over at Omi, and realized with a sudden unpleasant thrill that the boy was smiling. Far safer to look at Youji, sidling toward Manx and giving her an expansive grin.

"Well, well, if it isn't Miss Manx. I knew you couldn't stay away forever."  
"Now that, Youji," Manx replied, "is a far friendlier greeting than I was expecting. Unfortunately, this isn't exactly a social call." Not that she'd needed to point that out; the slim manila folder tucked under one of her arms spoke for itself. "Since you're all here, I see no reason we shouldn't begin…"

And she strode off to the basement, heels clicking confidently on the tile, without so much as a backward glance.

They formed a strange little group down there in the basement. Here Ken was shoulder-to-shoulder with three guys he should never have met: Omi, straight-arrow high-achiever, dividing the world into the innocent and the guilty and God help you if he decided you were with goats; Aya, son of a banker, discontented and isolated but self-consciously so and more so than ever now his sister was awake; Youji, drifting restlessly from girl to girl in search of Christ alone knew what, taking in everything and letting on to none of it. Where the Hell, Ken wondered, do  _I_ fit in? Where did any of them? Add Manx, every inch the prototypical executive assistant, and they only looked all the stranger.

Manx straightened, stepped away from the television. A single suspended moment later, the screen flickered into life, revealing the silhouette of a burly man sat behind a desk: Persia, or at least his digital ghost.

"Men of Weiss, a dangerous drug is being distributed in the city. Charme, sold as an appetite suppressant, is highly addictive and has already led to several deaths. Your targets are Professor Morimasa Andou, the drug's creator, along with his assistants Doctor Yaeko Nishida and Doctor Seihachi Watanuki, and distributor Tetsugo Kasamatsu."

Then the targets. First a head-and-shoulders shot of a middle-aged man, smug and well-fed and unremarkable in collar and tie: Professor Andou. Nishida was revealed as a dour woman in narrow-framed glasses with a scarred throat; Watanuki a sly, arrogant young man with a supercilious smile Ken itched to punch. Kasamatsu – tall, slender, dressed like Andou in a dark suit and the kind of tie a wife would have chosen to match – would have been just another fifty-something businessman, if not for the broken nose that made him look rather like a retired wrestler.

"Hunters of Light," the dead man said, "deny these dark beasts their tomorrows!"

The transmission died, the screen winked off. Manx, standing by the television with her arms folded beneath her breasts, switched off the television then snapped on the lights, turning to face them.

"I take it I can count on all of you?"

Ken thought of Omi standing in the doorway with his clothes spattered with blood, he thought of the girl Sayu, who he might well have seen coming to and from school or gossiping with her friends and now was dead. He nodded, quite unthinkingly; he stole a glance at Youji, and saw all the confirmation Manx might ever have needed in his face. Andou could have chosen no better way to earn Youji's disdain than dragging young women into his stupid science project. We're in, Manx. Now what?

"Manx," Omi was saying, "do we have any leads?"  
Manx nodded once, handing him the data folder. "Professor Andou," she said, "is a former government pharmacologist. He was last employed by the JSDF, working on a project codenamed X-308."  
"What's that?" Ken asked. "It sounds like some kinda robot."  
"X-308 was a drug intended for military use," Manx said, as if the interruption had never happened, "but we have no way to find out what the project involved aside from that. It seems that Andou dissolved his team and left his position without warning early last year, taking his research data with him. After that he went underground. It's theorized he's now operating from a laboratory somewhere in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Our agents suggest the bay area as the most likely location, but we may be wrong."  
Aya pushed himself away from the wall, looming stern as a schoolmaster over Omi's shoulder. "You've nothing more precise?"  
"I'm afraid not. We don't have much that's relevant on Andou's assistants so your best lead is Kasamatsu, the link man. He's the managing director of Shin-Akegata Logistics. Don't concern yourselves with his company. We had our agents check them out a week or so back, they're legitimate."

Well, that sucked. Ken sighed, essaying a look at Omi: he didn't look phased, just carried on flicking through the data folder, head diligently bowed, but that hardly meant the kid was happy to hear it, did it? Ken supposed it would have been a bit too easy if Kasamatsu's employees had any idea what their boss was doing with his down time; he supposed that Persia, whoever  _he_  was these days, wouldn't have bothered calling them in if there'd been the proof to haul the guy before the courts. But Christ he was sick of Persia shoving half-finished missions at them because he just couldn't be bothered to do any more leg work.

He said, "This hasn't got anything to do with the last lot, right?"  
"Esset?" Manx asked. "No. Someone's clearly backing this project, but it's nobody you've dealt with before."  
"And there's only one laboratory making the drug."  
That was Aya, his tone too flat for it to be any kind of a question, but Manx nodded all the same. "It's all coming from the one source, that much we do know. The Tokyo market is, officially at least, being used as a testing ground to determine Charme's popularity. This is merely my own opinion—" Manx tossed a curl over her shoulder, her expression as carefully neutral as ever, "—but I don't believe Andou or his backers are remotely interested in keeping the drug on the market."  
"So he's interested in the side-effects," Aya said.  
"And," Youji added tightly, "he's using women as guinea pigs."  
No prizes for working out what about this mission was eating  _him_. "Hey, Omi," Ken said, "you got any ideas how we're gonna find this guy?"  
Omi nodded. "I was thinking that maybe I could find the target by following the distribution routes. The drug's got to come from somewhere, hasn't it? If we trace the paths back far enough, it should lead us straight to Andou's laboratory."  
"Whatever it takes." Manx smiled, then snapped her briefcase closed and headed for the stairs.  
____

Before that, though, there was another avenue Omi wanted to investigate. If it turned out to go nowhere… well, that really couldn't be helped.

Mizuki Yoshiya hadn't been to class once since the day Sayu died. It was nothing at all, that following Monday, for a student as diligent as Tsukiyono-kun to offer to take some work round for her. The class captain, a girl called Sasaki, had thanked him distractedly, passed him a handful of preparations: Yoshiya-san lived in Suginami with her family, that wouldn't be too far out of his way, would it?

Of course not, Omi had told her. I'll drop these round after school…

(It was a lie, of course, but for a mission he'd have gone to Kyoto and hardly minded.)

The Yoshiya family's home in Nishi-Ogikubo, in a blank-faced, low-rise apartment block like so many of the others in the city, was a trim and tidy little place, tastefully but fussily decorated in neutral shades. Mizuki's mother – slim and bespectacled, with the air of a woman who was carried through life on a current of anxiety – answered the door, ushered him in through a perfect flurry of apologies for everything from the length of the journey and, with it, that he'd had to make it at all, to the fact she had something on the stove. Omi smiled through it all: honestly, it was no problem, no problem at all. He was happy to help, he didn't need a drink, really! Oh, and how was…

Mizuki's room was at the end of a short, narrow corridor. Her mother knocked tentatively, as if the girl were an invalid; tentatively, she called to her. Tsukiyono-san, bringing some classwork. Is it okay if he comes in?

She had been crying. Her lashes damp, eyes shadowed by lack of sleep, the girl who answered the door was barely recognizable as tall, confident Mizuki Yoshiya and, if anything, the hastily-brushed hair only made her look all the worse. Nothing could have hidden the exhaustion in her face, or the hunted, half-fearful look in her eyes. For a moment (Mrs. Yoshiya apologizing again as she ducked out of the room, closed the door on them) it left Omi thrown, unsure how to proceed or if he even wanted to, if he shouldn't have left the notes with her mother, and wished Mizuki well and left…

 _The mission_ , he cautioned himself.  _Remember what you're here for._

"I brought your notes," he ventured. "And Sasaki-san asked me to pass on her best wishes."  
"Thank you," Mizuki replied. Her voice was low, and shook slightly, and she must have spoken more because she felt she ought to than because she could honestly think of anything to say. "Tell her…" She hesitated, a look of confusion momentarily flickering across her face. "Tell her I'll be back soon."

Omi nodded sympathetically. He didn't doubt she meant it. He just didn't think Mizuki would be able to do that, that was all. Even to him the little white flowers placed on Sayu's empty desk were both an accusation and a reproach. How much worse would it have been for her?

"Of course," he said. Then, "The gym team asked after you, too."  
Mizuki simply nodded. She said, "All right. I… have I missed much?"  
"Not too much. You'll be able to make it up easily."

It wasn't as if the rest of 3-C had felt particularly like studying these past few days, either.

And that, for a long, uncomfortable moment, was it. The pair sat in silence, Omi shuffling the notes in his hands and thinking, should I really want to do this? Did he even need to? He shouldn't push it. It wasn't right of him, wasn't fair in the face of a bereavement still so recent – but what, he wondered, if Mizuki wanted to talk and simply didn't know how to ask? He'd seen—

"Mizuki-san?"  
"What happened?" She hadn't meant to cut him off. Had hardly meant to speak at all – the look on Mizuki's face told Omi that much. She looked awkward, shamefaced even, and yet… I need to know this, Tsukiyono-kun. You don't think that's terrible, do you? "I mean…"  
"They did all they could," Omi said. "Everyone did. Try not to blame yourself. There was nothing you could do—"  
"I didn't stop her!"  
"Mizuki-san?" Didn't stop her doing what?

She blamed the diet, of course. That and herself, for not talking Sayu out of it. Mizuki had warned her, hadn't she? Told her that she had to take things slower, that she'd never been fat to begin with! Told her that no boy was worth this, that she'd make herself ill if she carried on – Sayu hadn't listened. She had never listened at all! And if she could just have done better, tried a little harder to make her friend see sense, then maybe Sayu wouldn't have—

"It's not your fault," Omi told her. Quietly, firmly, only utterly serious; just for a moment he thought of Ouka again. "You can't blame yourself for this."  
"She should never have died!"  
"No," Omi said. He hoped he said it firmly. "She shouldn't have. But, Mizuki-san, it's not your fault she did. You did all you could for her."  
Mizuki shook her head. Whispered, "I should have stopped her."  
"But if she was really that determined to lose weight," Omi told her, "I don't think anybody could have."  
"I should have known!" Mizuki cried, and there were tears standing out in her eyes. "She… she just  _stopped eating_ , Tsukiyono-kun! I thought she'd soon start again, she felt so terrible, but then she started taking these pills and they… she didn't even  _notice_  she was hungry any more after that! And I begged her to stop but she said they really worked and if she stopped she'd get fat again, and… oh, God,  _Sayu_!"

She covered her face with her hands and wept. Behind her, the door swung open with a soft  _creak_.

"I think," Mrs. Yoshiya said quietly, "you should leave now, Tsukiyono-san."  
Omi swallowed and nodded. "Of course, Mrs. Yoshiya. I'm terribly sorry."

He bowed, picked up his bag and slipped from the apartment, stepping into his shoes at the door. Then, for a moment, he simply stood in the corridor, head bowed, hair hanging in his eyes, gazing at his feet. He supposed from the outside he might merely have looked upset, but his jaw was set, his blue eyes burning with hard-repressed fury. Just beyond that door Mizuki Yoshiya lay weeping on her bed, lost in her own guilt and grief; her mother stood by her side, powerless to help, unable even to reach her.

What kind of a person  _did_  this to the innocent?

Professor Morimasa Andou, Omi vowed, would pay dearly for it.  
____

It wasn't like Ken couldn't have made the miso if it had come down to it. It was just that at quarter past seven in the morning, with the whole day stretching ahead of him, it was a Hell of a lot simpler to go the Just Add Water route. At least this way he knew roughly how long it'd take to prepare and, with it, that Omi would have eaten something before he left for school. What with the kid up to his eyes in the usual pre-mission crap and acting like  _beds_ were something that happened to other people, it was the least Ken could do to make life easier for him.

Monday morning and, heading out for his run, he had found Omi asleep in the basement again, head pillowed on his folded forearms, a half-finished can of long-since flat soda by one elbow and the computer idling before him. Curious, Ken had knocked the mouse, blinked at the screen; he had wished, not for the first time, that Omi's lines of logic weren't so totally bloody impossible for anyone who wasn't him to follow. What the Hell did distribution records have to do with Ebola capsules? Sure Ken wished the best of luck to him, but Omi was on his own with that one…

So he sighed and shook his head, and draped a blanket about the kid's shoulders: what point was there in chasing Omi upstairs to his own room now? All that would mean was half an hour in an actual bed and disturbing what little sleep he'd managed to snatch. Apart from a slightly less stiff neck, it simply wasn't worth it.

Besides, if he'd woken him up probably all Omi would have done was bury himself in distribution records again.

So there was rice from the cooker and pickles on the table, and nori and miso soup, and for all the soup came from powder and Ken had bought the pickles at Tokyu, it was food. Omi, or so Ken told himself as he walked to the basement and stuck his head round the door, would eat it and like it or else.

"Oi, Omi! Breakfast!"

Now get your ass up here or I'll come down and fetch it.

It only took five minutes for Omi to drag himself away from whatever he was doing and make it to the table and even if he had brought his notebook with him, Ken still counted that as a partial victory. More unusually, Aya and Youji both made it down before the kid could vanish again, Aya quietly helping himself to the food and settling down at the head of the table with a newspaper spread out before him; Youji tousle-headed and bleary-eyed, only just alert enough not to miss his mug with the coffee, but present.

"Breakfast," Ken told him, dumping a bowl of rice down in front of him. "Coffee's not a food group, Kudou."  
"Says you," Youji muttered. Added, no doubt feeling that was rather below his usual standards, "You're gonna make a wonderful wife, you know? One day, Kenken, you will make some lucky man very happy."  
"Get bent," Ken suggested, raising his middle finger in salute. "Good night, then?"  
"Better than Omi's, by the looks of it. What  _is_ that, kiddo, homework or the other?"  
And Omi started, very nearly knocking over his soup. "Huh? Oh, uh… it's the mission. It's been a bit…"  
"They're always  _a bit_ ," Youji said. Then, to nobody in particular, "Kids these days."  
"Oi, Youji-kun! What's that supposed to mean?"  
"Oh, nothing. Just that if I'd had hot and cold running pornography at the touch of a key when I was your age, I wouldn't have been up all night reading about shipping companies."  
It wasn't even the first time Youji'd made that crack, but Omi colored all the same. That was probably why he kept on making it. "Youji-kun—!"  
"What," Aya asked, effectively cutting the argument off at the pass, "did you find?"

And Omi hesitated, as if that was a good question: like it or not Ken thought Youji had a point. At least the scruffy stuff would have been interesting. You didn't have to be a boy genius to know when an investigation was dying on its feet – if Omi had been up all night he either had a hot lead or no clue, and he wasn't excited enough for it to be the former. Weiss were stuck on shipping ledgers; the investigation was spinning its wheels. Simply, they needed a break.

"Well," Omi said, giving Aya a grateful smile which the redhead seemed totally immune to, "I've got something, but it's not a lot. Manx really wasn't kidding when she said Professor Andou went underground. There's nothing on him since he left his job. Bank data's a no-go, he cleared his accounts last March and there's been zero movement since."  
"So that's well and truly out, then," Youji said. "Got any good news?"  
"It depends how you define  _good_ , I suppose. We weren't wrong in assuming Kasamatsu's company was handling the business end of things, but there's a problem. Shin-Akegata's involved, but only up to a point."  
"Up to a  _point_?" Ken echoed. "What does that mean?"  
"I'm coming to that, Ken-kun. Charme is officially on a market trial and currently only available in a few hundred stores, so Shin-Akegata distributes it direct to the retailers. The catch is that the delivery agents don't make their pickups from a factory. The drugs all come from a warehouse in Shin-Kiba, and after that the trail goes dead. However the drugs end up in that warehouse, it's not through the target's company, or any other distribution company either." Omi rubbed at his temples, hoping to stave off an incipient headache.  
"The trail just goes dead? That's kind of odd," Ken said.  
Omi nodded. "I'm starting to think we've found out about all we're going to this way, at least for now."  
"Agreed," Aya said. "Omi, where is this warehouse?"  
"I took its address." Omi flipped open the notebook and tore out a page, stretching across the table to hand it to Aya. "I figured… well, the drugs have to get there somehow, right? If another company isn't taking them, it might well be one of the targets, or someone who can lead us to them… Aya-kun, are you going to go there?"  
Aya merely nodded. "I'll handle it."  
"And," Youji said, "I'll handle it too," then smiled at Aya's frown. "You'll need someone to watch your back."

And, Ken thought, you don't want to go to work. He gave Youji a disapproving frown; Youji, an innocent smile planted firmly on a face that didn't suit it, pretended a sudden fascination in his coffee cup.

Omi turned back to the pickles and rice. Quick and neat as a cat, he finished up his bowl and, stacking his plates in the sink, vanished to his room to shower and dress. Youji poured himself another coffee and lit the first cigarette of the day, picking diligently at his food without ever actually seeming to eat any. Aya buried himself in foreign news, looking for articles about America.

Ken sighed, chin propped in his palm, and stared out the window. Said, "Why don't we buy the pills?" then wondered why his companions were giving him such strange looks. Had that come out weird or something?

"What?"  
"Why," Youji asked, slowly and carefully as if he were trying to talk Ken down from the edge of the roof, "exactly do you want poisoned diet pills, Kenken? You're not thinking of losing weight, are you?"  
"Fuck off, Youji. No I'm not thinking of going on a diet."  
"Then what's the point of having them?" Aya asked, and even he sounded a little lost.  
Yeah, that had come out weird. "I mean for the leaflet thing," Ken said uneasily. "You know. When you buy headache pills there's this leaflet which tells you how to take them, and it's got… oh,  _fuck_  it!"

And jumped from his seat, and ran from the kitchen.

It took far longer than he thought it would to locate the painkillers. (Shouldn't they have been someplace accessible? Never knew when they might need them again in a hurry…) Five minutes of turning out drawers and closets and Ken finally located a box of Tylenol somewhere in the bathroom. A quick check to see that the leaflet was still there and he was running back down again, the box in one hand, almost tearing the leaflet in his haste to tug it free – back into the kitchen, to Youji regarding him coolly over the rim of his coffee mug, and Aya back behind his newspaper pretending he'd heard nothing at all. Honestly, one of these days he was just going to stop helping and see how they liked  _that_.

"Are you going somewhere with this?" Youji asked after a long, pointed pause  
"Look," Ken said. He shoved the paper into Youji's hands, pointing a few tiny lines of text out to him. Yes, Youji's raised eyebrow said, that's a pharmacy leaflet, Ken… " _There_. These things have addresses on them. And phone numbers."  
"And you think knowing this'll help?" Youji asked.  
"They won't print the laboratory's address on a pharmacy leaflet, Ken," Aya said from behind his paper.  
"They'll have to lead to  _some_ thing," Ken countered. "I'm not saying that professor's going to be stupid enough to print his address on the box but if there's a phone number it's gotta be genuine or someone'd have said something. There's gotta be something at the address for the same reason." He folded his arms. Said, stubbornly, "I wanna look into it."  
All Aya said was, "Suit yourself." Undercurrent of,  _you're wasting your time_. Ken set his jaw against it.  
"Yeah thanks for that, Aya, but I wasn't asking your permission. And it's your turn to wash up.  
____

He swore it was a good idea in theory, and certainly way more useful than stranding himself in the shop making lily and rose arrangements until he fantasized about hanging himself with gift ribbon. The problem was Ken hadn't really anticipated quite how embarrassing trying to buy diet pills would prove. If he had any idea quite how difficult the whole process would turn out to be, he would have kept his mouth shut about addresses and pharmacy leaflets and pushed the thought aside…

He certainly wouldn't, once Aya and Youji had left for Shin-Kiba and a day sat outside a warehouse trying not to look sinister, have headed for a drugstore.

The minute he'd got there Ken realized he'd made a terrible mistake. He hadn't had the first idea where women went to look for all that stuff they used and, stranded between shelf on overloaded shelf of mystifying creams and infusions and sinister-looking stainless-steel devices for doing who knew what, and (did women really have a  _use_ for all this stuff?) endless bottles of multicolored goo, he had felt self-conscious and stupid and horribly, horribly out of place. He could hardly have felt less conspicuous if he'd showed up dressed as a panda or something.

It took far too long to find the diet products and he must have looked a bit too pleased when he did. One of the shop girls, who'd been hovering a few feet away like she was worried he was going to start stealing or breaking things, gave him a very strange look which, for a moment or two, Ken was too startled to return. Sure he was on the skinny side if he was anything and obviously in shape and the only way he could have been a less likely candidate for appetite suppressants was if he'd been a sumo wrestler, but he was trying to pay these people for stuff, wasn't he?

(Didn't they  _want_  his money or something? Wasn't guy money good enough for them?)

Selecting a toothbrush and a bar of soap he didn't really want in the hope that it'd somehow offset the painful  _girliness_  of buying purple diet drugs, Ken picked his way through the shelves of stuff to the registers, nearly running into a pigtailed college girl. She smiled, and Ken grinned back in sheer embarrassment and murmured an apology.

"Are those for your girlfriend?"  
"Huh?" Crap, she'd seen the pills? Ken smiled at her again and his smile was now very definitely awkward. Dammit what the Hell was he supposed to say to the girl? Lie and say he did have a girlfriend because it beat being the guy out buying purple diet pills because he wanted them, or tell the truth and say he didn't and have her think he was some kind of weirdo? "Well… yeah, yeah they are, she, um… she's on a health kick?"  
"And you're buying them for her? That's cool, you must be a real considerate guy! Most of the guys I know wouldn't dream of doing something like that…"  
"Uh. Thanks?"

If only he had been Aya. Or Youji. Either would have done – girls didn't mess with Aya, or at least they didn't expect him to mess with them back, and Youji knew how to handle it. Ken? He just had to make it up as he went along and usually fucked things up.

At least he supposed he'd use the toothbrush sometime. As for the pills, it wasn't even as if they'd led him to anything, or rather not to anything significant. Once he'd finally escaped from the drugstore and followed the address given on the leaflet he wasn't totally sure what he'd been expecting the visit to tell him. Not that Ken was about to admit anything of the sort to Aya, of course, but it looked like he had been right all along. Man, he hated it when Aya had a point.

The sea breeze tugging at his hair, Ken sighed and slumped down onto the handles of his motorbike, resting his chin on his crossed wrists, the leaflet crumpled in one hand. Well, sometimes hunches took a guy nowhere…

Yeah. Nowhere, Kawasaki.  _Charme_ , said the leaflet,  _is manufactured and distributed by Tellus Pharmaceuticals_ — Ken had never heard of them but if they could afford all this stuff they could hardly be hurting for money. Here was the factory, on an industrial estate in Kawasaki-ku built on land that had probably been under water fifty years ago. The head office was in Tokyo proper, in the Maranouchi business district in Chiyoda. It sounded like a fashionable location insofar as Ken was any judge, which he admitted he probably wasn't.

He had parked the bike across the street from the factory complex: a large, busy and seemingly prosperous concern. Steam poured from the chimneys; cars and lorries buzzed around car parks and loading bays like bees round a hive; the occasional person crossed the yards and winding pathways between the buildings, from warehouse to factory, factory to plant office, plant office to laboratory and from there back to the warehouse, hurrying from A to B and back again on very important errands whose purpose a bored florist with an interesting night job couldn't even begin to divine. From here it seemed to be more about looking busy than because there was any real need to hurry. It couldn't be that difficult to convince people they didn't want to be sick.

The chances that Andou and his twisted buddies were hiding out  _here_  were not just minimal but nonexistent. It was too large, too busy. Too many people who might have noticed a stray Government scientist. Too many people who could have recognized him:  _hey, didn't you used to be Morimasa Andou?_

The catch? If Charme was bloody death in capsule form then why would Tellus want to claim  _they_  made it? Obviously they weren't doing anything of the sort; if Omi said the stuff was coming from a laboratory then he would no doubt have damn good reason for believing so. They wouldn't make something like that here for the same reason Professor Andou wouldn't have tried to lose himself here. What the Hell'd they get out of saying that they did, except for bad PR?

This, Ken thought, is weird.  
____  
  
The warehouse was, Youji thought, a distinct disappointment.

After all the build-up he'd expected something search-lit and heavily-guarded but all it was, was a warehouse. Sure he'd been watching too many terrible movies. Sure the guys from the distribution company weren't to know there was anything the matter with the drug they were shipping out to the stores and there was no need to make things look any weirder than they had to. Sure, there was no way a busy street in Shin-Kiba was going to turn itself out like something out the finale of  _Tango and Cash_ , but at least that would have had a certain flair.

It stood in an ordinary street with another warehouse on either side, all three long and low and utterly aesthetically uninteresting. The buildings faced onto in a wide expanse of tarmac that probably served as a combination of car park and loading bay, which was, if possible, even more boring than they were. The only interesting thing in sight was the round tower of the building just behind them, with a slate-gray mushroom-capped roof and some kind of dovecote construction perched foolishly on top. What was that, some kind of silo? An extremely half-assed lighthouse? As for security, all there was was a single uniformed guard drowsing in a cramped cabin.

The most interesting thing that had happened so far had been trying to find a parking space, and even that had a tedious solution in the form of the wood museum across the road. What kind of guy seriously visited a wood museum? Hell, who thought it was a good idea to  _open_  one?

"Next time, Fujimiya," Youji said, "we're hiring a van. The only way this wheelbarrow of yours could stand out worse is if you painted it pink."  
Aya's look said one more crack like that and he'd be walking home. "I don't see your car holding up any better."  
"That," Youji told him, giving him a smirk Ken had assured him was utterly infuriating, "is why we're not in it."

Not that the guard noticed. He probably wouldn't have cared if they had shown up in a clown car and stood by it taking photographs. The man was too caught up in the day's Sudoku to pay much attention to the assassins across the way. Figured, really. Guy probably dreamed of the day something vaguely exciting happened on his watch and when a pair of assassins show up hoping to kill his boss he's doing a damn Sudoku. It would make for a pretty good parable if only he could think of a moral…

"Hey, Aya," he said, because if he didn't say something he thought he'd go crazy, "what kind of guy thinks it's a good idea to open a wood museum in the middle of an industrial estate?"  
"Why," Aya said stiffly, "are you asking me?"  
"I don't know. Your family were rich, some of their friends must've been rich and nuts. Cigarette?"  
"I don't smoke in my car." Suggestion of, and you won't either if you know what's good for you.  
And Youji sighed. "Aya," he said, tugging a battered packet from his jacket pocket, "I am offering you a cigarette. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bum a smoke off me without me making a production number of it. If I were you I'd open the window and make the most of it. Now, taking this from the top… do you want a cigarette?"  
"All right."

Youji nodded. Lit the cigarette he was holding and passed it to Aya, then took another one for himself.

Even with cigarettes, surveillance was a chore. It had always been his least favorite part of detective work; no surprises that being with Weiss hadn't changed  _that_  when all it meant was the same old tedium in far less appealing company. Might as well have gone to the wood museum and at least been creatively bored. Youji slumped down in his seat again, hands propped behind his head, and stared out of the windscreen at the security guard in his cabin, caged in his little box like a specimen in a tank. Guy hadn't even looked up yet. Either that was a damn difficult Sudoku, or he was just really bad at them…

Next to him Aya gazed tirelessly out of the window, his expression as attentive and composed as Youji's was sleepily uninterested; too bad Youji had a sneaking feeling he wasn't really paying attention. Thinking of whatever it was Aya did think, when he wasn't thinking of anything very much… Should have bought a book, really. Or got Omi to check the company's delivery rosters, but he realized that if things really did become as vague as the boy claimed beyond this point perhaps there wouldn't be one. It was a bit late to be thinking of that now.

"And if they don't show?"  
"Huh?" Youji started. Hadn't expected Aya to break the silence. "We come back," he said simply. You know that. "And back and back and back until Kasamatsu shows his face or we get a better lead. Maybe Omi'll turn up something…"  
Aya didn't quite sigh, but he looked like he wanted to. "Then here's to better leads."

Cars and trucks drifted into view, then back away to more interesting prospects; a lorry pulled into the warehouse next door and made a moderately entertaining hash of it. The dust blew in eddies across the warehouse forecourt. The smell of the sea wafted in through the Porsche's open window. And nothing happened, nothing at all  
____

Some days school was only a distraction. Impatient, frustrated, unable to concentrate, Omi had watched the clock and willed the day to pass; he'd gazed over at Sayu's empty desk then at Mizuki, pale and distant, worrying at a tissue beneath her desk; how on earth was he supposed to concentrate on English grammar when the target might as well have been tapping on the window? He'd spent the brief lunch period in the library with his laptop, working far harder and with more focus than he had given to any of his classes, and going hungry seemed a small price to pay for it.

Missions always came first. They had to. It was a relief to be home, to be able to think again.

Ken wasn't in the shop, which straight away was odd. What was odder was what he was doing when Omi found him. Stepping into the break room, he spotted Ken sat on one of the couches, a small purple-and-white capsule between finger and thumb: as Omi watched – had Ken even noticed him coming in? – he held it up to the light, frowning at it as if he wanted to ask it a question, but couldn't quite work out what. Another identical capsule had been split open, the white powder it contained poured onto a sheet of paper.

"Um," Omi said, "I'm home. Ken-kun? Is everything okay?"  
"Huh?" Ken started, dropping the pill. "Oh, hi, Omi… yeah, yeah, it's fine, I was just… Shop's kinda dead so I took a bit of a break. How was class?"  
"Oh, okay, I guess," Omi said noncommittally. "You've had a good day?"  
"Total wash. Went to check an address, but there was damn-all doing. Youji and Aya better get something…" Ken slumped slightly, settling back into the couch cushions and closing his eyes – he opened them again a few seconds later, a frown creasing his brow. "Hey, Omi," he said, "ever heard of a company called Tellus Pharmaceuticals?"  
Maybe his day hadn't been such a wash after all. "Tellus? Huh… no, I don't think so, Ken-kun. Why do you ask?"  
"Well, it's just—hang on a minute, I got it somewhere."

Ken straightened, digging in his apron pocket then, with a curse, in the pockets of his jeans, finally retrieving a small, crumpled piece of paper. He tried and failed to smooth down the creases, carefully underlined something on it with a ballpoint pen, then (are you going somewhere with this, Ken-kun?) he handed it over. Omi could feel the weight of his friend's gaze as he peered at the tiny print, first in confusion, then in naked curiosity. Could tell he was waiting for something, as if he wasn't quite sure what he thought of all this and was hoping Omi would tell him.

"It's kinda weird," Ken said into the sudden silence. "Isn't this stuff dangerous?"  
"It is rather strange, isn't it?" Shrugging his bag off his shoulder, Omi sat down, frowning at the leaflet. "I can't imagine why any company would want to put their name to this. Maybe… perhaps Andou cut a deal with them? He could have offered them something else if they agreed to sign off on Charme that made the bad PR worth it, I suppose…"  
"Maybe," Ken said dubiously. "Man, I dunno, Omi. This doesn't feel right."

No. No, it didn't. What could Andou have to trade to make Tellus think courting disaster by associating themselves with a tainted drug was somehow okay? Companies and businessmen didn't do anything  _just because_ , they wouldn't lay themselves open if they didn't think there was something to gain…

Not that this got them any further. Omi put the paper on the break room table, resting his hand on it for a moment, then sat back. It was nothing to do with Weiss what Tellus wanted. All they had to do was see that Andou was stopped.

"No… You probably won't like this either, Ken-kun."  
What, there's more? Damn, Ken's frown said, that really is just great. "I won't like what?"  
"I've started looking into Andou's associates," Omi said. "I thought since Kasamatsu wasn't a certainty one of the others might have something we could get him on, so…"  
Ken nodded. "Yeah, makes sense, ain't like we got any better ideas. What happened?"  
"Well, there's not much on Doctor Watanuki. He graduated from Kyushu University, did a couple of internships after moving home to Tokyo and vanished about four months back. All his old workmates thought he must have found a job elsewhere and left town, I'm afraid I've no idea how Andou got hold of him. The real issue's Doctor Nishida."  
"Nishida? She's the woman, right?"  
"Mm. She used to work for Waseda University. This might be coincidence, but Nishida took sick leave shortly before Andou left his job. She said she was going to have a throat operation and retired on medical grounds afterwards. I thought maybe that was a cover story, but I got hold of her medical records to double check and apparently she had a thyroidectomy in January 1998, so I'm not sure what to think now."  
"I think she had a throat op," Ken said; Omi supposed he must have looked dubious because Ken smiled at him, and shook his head. "Oh, come on. It's not  _all_  gotta be some giant conspiracy. Can't she just have gotten sick?"  
"But that doesn't explain how she took up with Andou."  
Ken just shrugged. "Well, cancer makes people think. Guess she must've thought to Hell with being nice."

He got to his feet, brushing off his jeans, headed back to Momoe and the shop. Clearly the conversation was over.

For a moment Omi simply sat there – jacket still on him, bag by his side – and gazed at the door and thought, well, why does it have to be significant? Why should Nishida's illness imply anything at all? Most likely Ken was right and he couldn't find the meaning because there was no meaning to find. Just a sick woman with nothing to do but think and wait, lying in bed listening for the surgeon's footsteps and wondering was it worth it, if this really is it?

Nobody said that re-evaluations had to mean a change for the better, but that didn't get them anywhere either. It was time he got back to work.  
____

Dusk fell, the sky purpling like a new bruise. Across the waterfront, streetlamps and floodlights and loading bay lamps flickered on, routing the gathering darkness, bathing the area in a sickly, bluntly artificial glow and casting grotesquely attenuated shadows across the largely empty goods yards. And nothing happened.

Youji yawned, tried to stretch; it wasn't advisable for a six foot man in a sports car, but there were times when it couldn't be helped. Next time he'd bring a book. It'd beat trying to talk to Aya… Man, stakeouts in industrial zones really were the worst. At least in the heart of the city there'd have been plenty of other things to see and plenty of places to keep watch from, cafes were always a good one. Here? Sit tight and watch the steady ebb and flow of cars and covered trucks roll past the windows, and hope like Hell the target shows before you give up the will to live. And then come back tomorrow and do it all over again…

"Maybe we should be casing his house," Aya suggested as the light began to fail.  
"Hold that thought," Youji told him. "Guess we can give it a go tomorrow if we totally strike out here."

There'd been a shift change a couple of hours back. Oh, hooray. The Sudoku aficionado had gone; his replacement, tense and lean and watchful, was far younger, and still new enough at the job to take it seriously. He'd cast a couple of suspicious looks in their direction; Youji had very nearly given him a wave. No Kasamatsu, though. Nothing like him.

Sighing, Youji lit another cigarette, and hummed a verse of  _Road to Nowhere_  under his breath as he smoked.

"Either put that out or give me one."  
"For Pete's sake, Aya," Youji griped, reaching for the packet again, "why don't you ever buy your own cigarettes?"

But they were both in the same boat. Car. Whatever. Either way Youji wasn't going to make an issue of it. Bad enough being here at all without making matters worse by picking a pointless fight. Whatever happened next he was going to be stuck with Aya for the next couple of hours. Being stuck with a nicotine-deprived Aya? No thank you.

Aya didn't look around at the sound of a car engine in the distance, though Youji's eyes narrowed slightly, his gaze flickering briefly along the evening-quiet road more out of habit than anything. Just another car; what else was old? They were both slipping easily back into lassitude when the car – a large, sleek company sedan – swung round the corner and purred down the road toward the wood museum, engine barely ticking over as it pulled up in front of the Shin-Akegata warehouse.

Youji's eyes widened, then narrowed; Aya hastily ground his cigarette out in the ashtray, sitting up straight as, across the road, the security guard pushed open the window of his cabin. He leant out to exchange a few words with the sedan's driver, then the gates swung slowly open and the car turned into the goods yard, coming to a halt just before the warehouse doors. The sedan's door swung open; a tall, slender individual in a suit and tie stepped out, spotlit in the halogen lamps as if he were stepping onstage.

The man's skin was bleached to a sickly pallor; his shadow stretched out across the yard, monstrous in its elongation. Stood like that, profile picked out by the questing lights, the broken nose was only too obvious in an otherwise almost delicate face.

"Target," Aya murmured.  
Kasamatsu. Youji nodded, stubbing out his own cigarette, flipping the butt through the open window. " _That's_  our guy."

Now this was more like it. All they had to do was wait for him to come back out again…

Until then? Only another stretch of nothing at all. Youji sighed, settled back in his seat and if anything the wait was only going to be all the worse now for knowing that they were watching over more than a potentiality. He had just started to regret stubbing out the cigarette when the warehouse door swung open again and Kasamatsu stormed out, back set and head up, with a younger man – some kind of warehouse manager, by the looks of him – dogging his heels, a clipboard in one hand.

"Whoa," Youji said. "Someone doesn't look happy."

Possibly that had been an understatement. As the two assassins watched, Kasamatsu hurried back across the yard toward his sedan. The young man called something to him, reached out to catch at his boss's shoulder, holding out the clipboard as if for him to inspect; Kasamatsu turned on him, shouted something Youji couldn't quite hear. From the manager's reaction, from the way he fell back, cowed, clutching the clipboard to him as if it were a kind of shield, it had been nothing good. Youji reached for his seatbelt.

He looked up again at the slam of a door: Kasamatsu, back in his car. Leaning out the wound-down window, he was calling to the manager as the sedan's engine roared back into life. The man might have said something, might have nodded; he was already hurrying back to the warehouse as Kasamatsu's car lurched forward and sped out of the lot.

Aya didn't say a word. He simply fired the Porsche's engine and took off after their prey.


	4. Einsatz: Warning shots

Sometimes, even Aya chose to hunt from a distance.

The Metropolitan Expressway, as it swung away from the heart of the city and down toward Haneda, was swollen with late-evening traffic. Powerful executive cars carrying their powerful executive owners back to their homes and wives and the children they hadn’t seen awake since Sunday, or to assignations with their mistresses; speeding lorries headed for docks or industrial zones; little jujube-like town cars struggling to keep pace with the rest. Kasamatsu, his sedan weaving through the clusters of cars, almost lost amongst knots of near-identical sedans, then individualizing itself again – _here I am_ – as Kasamatsu veered sharp and sudden back into the fast lane.

Aya kept well back as he threaded through the traffic after his prey. Taking care to keep Kasamatsu’s car in his sights, taking care not to stick too close. The Porsche stood out like a dove in a crowd of city pigeons, remarkable and yet only out of place, entirely ill-suited to the demands of its environment.

“What have I told you,” Youji grumbled from the passenger seat, “about European sports cars and tail jobs?”  
“That antique of yours would only break down,” Aya said evenly.  
“Look, only posers and car magazines think white’s a good color for something you’re supposed to drive… hey, if we said we needed it for missions, think Kritiker would front for a Windom?” 

Aya said nothing, eyes narrowing as he dropped back a bit. Much as he hated to admit it, Youji had a point about the Porsche’s distinctiveness – and though Youji’s car (and it was a ridiculous thing; no wonder the British motor industry had died on its feet) was no better where blending in was concerned and in all other regards considerably worse, Youji wasn’t driving and they weren’t in his car. The last thing they wanted, after the time it had taken to find Kasamatsu, was to lose him again on the Metropolitan Expressway. He dropped back into the middle lane, ducking behind a Mazda Demio, gaze fixed on Kasamatsu’s taillights as the lights of Odaiba slipped past the windows and the entrance to the Tokyo Bay tunnel loomed in the middle distance.

“Aya,” Youji said, “I never thought I’d tell you this, but there is such a thing as being too cautious.”  
Aya’s eyes flickered briefly over to Youji. “So are we too distinctive or not?”  
“I dunno about distinctive, Fujimiya, but the target thinks this is Le Mans. You’re gonna lose him.” 

Kasamatsu was driving like a man possessed. Courting a speeding ticket, a court summons, a one-way trip to the morgue. Ordinarily Aya wouldn’t have cared one way or another if a target chose to wipe himself out on the roads and save them the trouble of taking him down, but here and now to lose Kasamatsu would be – call it an inconvenience.

“He’s seen us, then.”  
“No,” Youji said, leaning forward to try and keep the sedan in view; not the easiest of things with the heavy traffic and the way Aya was sticking so resolutely to his holding pattern. “No. He’s just pissed about something. If he was trying to lose you he wouldn’t stick to the expressways. Nobody’d try and outrun a Porsche in that thing.”

Up ahead, the sedan vanished into the mouth of the tunnel. Aya followed him down, the erratic pools of light cast by streetlamps and headlights replaced by the steady, sickly neon-orange of the tunnel lights; his ears filled with the thrum of the fans, the rushing of the trapped air. Down here beneath the waters of the bay, the tunnel walls close about them, even Kasamatsu was playing it safe. Neatly penned in behind a lorry, for the moment the man seemed quite content to hold his position.

“Looks like he’s headed for Ota,” Aya said. Then, “Did Omi mention a home address?”  
Youji nodded, expression set and focused, tone serious, as the tunnel lights played across his face. “Wife and kids live in Nakameguro. There’s rumors about a mistress in Tsukishima, but if she exists Omi wasn’t able to track her down. Wherever he thinks he’s going, it’s not home.”

Back out into the city, back into the open and the lights of the Ohi thermal power station had barely had time to slip from view before Kasamatsu was stepping on it again, lurching back to the passing lane and tearing away. Aya bit back a curse and followed, veering wildly across two lanes of traffic in pursuit of Kasamatsu’s weaving taillights.

They tore past goods yards, past shipping crates piled row on endless row; past the Shikansen trainyards at the Tokyo Freight Terminal. Ahead of them scores of red-and-white pinpricks stretching away in both directions; lorry drivers _en route_ to Yokohama or Kawasaki City and travelers hurrying to the airport jockeying with weary commuters headed for the comforts of home, their minds on dinner, a long, hot bath and an evening in front of the television. Get in lane for Tokyo International Airport (Haneda). A plane split the sky, toy-small and illuminated almost garishly by the cabin lights, the flashing red-and-blue beacons on the wingtips. Kasamatsu, heading away from Tokyo, was almost lost to sight in the endless files of traffic. 

“Youji.”  
“Huh?” Youji, leaning forward and watching the road, started as if Aya had caught him doing something he shouldn’t. “What is it?”  
Eyes narrowed, thinking of nothing but Kasamatsu, Aya didn’t even look round. “Call the others.”  
“Sure thing.” Youji reached for the car phone, then hesitated, one hand on the receiver. “Reckon that’s what all this is about, then? Trouble with his buddy Andou?”  
“It’s possible,” Aya said.  
“Then we gotta move fast if we wanna break up the party before they do it to themselves,” Youji mused, picking up the phone and dialing the _Koneko_. “You better be going to the laboratory, Kasamatsu. And you, Fujimiya—” he jabbed one finger toward Aya, “—don’t you even think of losing him.”  
“I’m thinking nothing of the sort.”

 As Youji pressed the phone to his ear, Kasamatsu’s car veered back across the stream of traffic and into the exit lane. Indicating. Aya slipped out of lane after him, signaling a turn. Dropping down the off ramp after Kasamatsu, heading for the industrial zones. Down and into the heart of Kawasaki City.  
____

Andou, it turned out, had been working in a box.

The laboratory was a small, squat, Sixties construction skulking in a cracked tarmac yard scored with springing clusters of weeds and the off-white lines of parking bays, alongside which a few ailing trees struggled feebly to grow. It was little more than a collection of low-rise plate-glass shoeboxes connected by covered walkways, its sides – all glass and brushed steel and walls which should have been painted grey to begin with simply to save time – were mottled with the green and brown stains left by rainwater runoff from the impeccably utilitarian flat roof, which time and a temperate climate had revealed as only horribly impractical. Behind the boxes loomed three huge tanks, towering over the low roofs like monsters from a lazy Sunday B-picture.

It was nothing special during the day; by night, huddled beneath the glare of the harsh halogen lamps, it looked one strong tremor away from collapsing completely. The laboratory was an architect’s anti-bourgeois fantasy translated into the real world and unable to cope with the strain: verdigris bloomed on the once-pristine walls, cracks cobwebbed the concrete, the glass was smeared with streaks of grime. The building seemed to slump, tired and diffident, to the back of the yard, as if it knew how seedy it looked and was apologizing for it.

From the front, the building looked quite deserted – but in the windows of one of the smaller buildings, tucked neatly away behind the main block and quite invisible from the road, lights burned.

“You’re _sure_ Andou’s in there?” Ken, frankly incredulous. “How the Hell is that thing still _standing_?”  
Aya simply nodded. “I doubt he’s moved in the last twenty-four hours.”

Omi said nothing. His mechanical mind was working: scanning the building, marrying up what he already knew from the blueprints to its three-dimensional equivalent, taking in everything from the locations of broken windows and doors swinging slightly in the breeze to the play of light and shadow.

A target choosing to hide their crimes behind an innocuous, workaday façade was no surprise to him. The inadequacy of Andou’s, though, was something new. If the laboratory had been in good repair that would have been one thing, but this place was a wreck. Acquired from Akutagawa Biomedical after a company merger in 1996 it had stood empty ever since, its new owners having found so little use for it they hadn’t even bothered changing the signage. It would have been easy enough for the targets to set up shop in there without anyone, even the building’s owners, being any the wiser…

One minor detail, discovered almost by accident, had stuck in Omi’s mind. The company which swallowed Akutagawa Biomedical whole two years previous had been Tellus Pharmaceuticals.

“I think,” he said, quiet and cautious, “this might be easier than it looked. Aya-kun, there’s a door half-open over there, that might be a good way to get in. Youji-kun, Ken-kun… could you check the laboratories? It’s not an objective, but I think we should destroy the drug if we can.”  
“Gotcha.” Ken again, nodding briskly. “I’m on it.”

The sedan was there again, parked rather more neatly than it had been the night before when Aya and Youji, watching from across the road, had seen Kasamatsu leave it, lights burning, skewed across two of the marked bays. It had turned out to be a flying visit, but a vital one: ten minutes after pulling up Kasamatsu had stormed from the laboratory, a diminutive, bespectacled woman in a white dust coat following in his wake. She had stood there, silent and disinterested, as Kasamatsu harangued her about being fobbed off, demanded to know why Andou was refusing to see him. Nishida had listened silently. Had promised him a meeting ‘tomorrow night’. She had pursed her thin lips as Kasamatsu’s car pulled away, then turned on her heel and strode off, her small, slender figure swallowed up by the shadows around the building.

It seemed strange, after struggling for so long to get anywhere at all, that everything should have been resolved so neatly. A meeting in a day – it could hardly have worked out better if they had stage-managed it…

Tonight, too, it was to be Weiss’s show.  
____

The building was old; security was a sham. It was the work of a moment for Aya, his dark clothing leaving him almost lost to the shadows, to slip through the invitingly open fire door.

Inside, the old laboratory smelt of dust and decay and damp rot and, as a grace-note, of chemicals and some kind of gas; graffiti tags had been scrawled on the walls near the open door with its smashed, extinguished ‘fire exit’ sign, but as Aya slipped further from the door, the signs of vandalism tailed off. Something about the atmosphere of the place – the smell, perhaps, or the long, emptily echoing corridors he was walking through – seemed to discourage transients and bored teenagers alike.

Perhaps whatever it was they felt was working on him too. Though Aya walked quietly, his footsteps still sounded too loud; he could almost have wished he didn’t have to stick to the shadows. The only light slanted into the corridor from the large windows that lined one side of it, windows which opened out onto what the original plans must have  envisioned as a manicured courtyard garden: now gone to seed, the grass stood tall and dry and wild as savannah, the single tree overgrown and sickly-looking. Aya walked on, ignoring the courtyard’s descent into atavism, the broken windows, the way the moonlight and the floodlights played along the corridor floor. The building felt empty, smelt the same and, going by the undisturbed dust in the corridor, nobody had walked this way in some time…

And yet he was not alone.

Voices. He’d heard them caught and carried on the still night air as he slipped through the door, then growing louder and clearer as he stalked the empty corridors. Kasamatsu speaking that one bit too loud, his tones harsh and clipped; then another man, his voice quieter and harder to catch. A man with an educated voice, who spoke as if he was used to being listened to: Professor Andou, or so Aya supposed. Clearly, whatever they were talking about, Kasamatsu was not happy. And, as the businessman’s voice grew still louder, still more angry, clearly Andou couldn’t have cared less.

Two, then. Not ideal but neither target was young or used to physical exertion and, hopefully at least, neither would be armed. At least their argument would be distracting them.

Stopping in a small side corridor (signs of life here, of footprints tracking back and forth along the dusty hallway and rubbing the middle of the floor quite clean) Aya paused, head raised, listening to the sound of the men’s voices, then nodded once.

Upstairs, then: moving near-silently, knowing himself unobserved but still instinctively sticking to the scant shadows, Aya flitted ghostlike down the corridor and into the stairwell, following the tracks left by the passage of the targets’ feet. Kasamatsu was shouting now – the business, the bottom line, do you have the first idea, Professor, how much trouble your little science fair project’s made for me? – slamming the heel of one hand hard against the table; Andou, on the other hand, was speaking so quietly Aya could hardly hear him at all.

The first thing he noticed as he reached the top of the stairs was the warm light from Andou’s commandeered offices spilling out into the corridor through an open door, casting a soft glow quite unlike the sharp, pale moonlight that had flooded the halls below. Aya was about to step out into the corridor, only to be brought up short by the sound of footsteps and an ear-splitting _crash_ ; a door slamming, abruptly cutting off the only real illumination the corridor had.

Tensing, the breath catching in his throat, Aya dropped back into the gloom and lost himself. Standing sentry-still, katana hidden in the folds of his coat, he watched from the corners of his eyes as a man, gaunt and stiff-backed, stalked back down the corridor toward him. Kasamatsu again, instantly recognizable even here. Aya waited, poised to strike, for the man to enter the stairway – he could only watch as Kasamatsu slipped through his would-be murderer’s grasp, striding straight down the passageway and away.

Aya watched him go incuriously, stepping back into the corridor and closing the door silently behind him; all he was thinking was _no_. Professor Andou, securely ensconced in his offices, was still the primary target.

Kasamatsu would simply have to wait.  
____

Every target fucked up someplace: that was why they ended up dead. Though the laboratory wasn’t large, Youji and Ken could easily have spent all night searching the building and found nothing; that, though, had been where Andou had gotten it wrong. All it would have taken was for the Professor and his buddies to leave a few more lights on, and to sweep the halls from time to time.

Someone out there thought Andou and his two cronies were smart. Hell, they were doctors, right? So why hadn’t any of them realized that working from lighted rooms in otherwise darkened buildings and leaving footprints all over dust-furred corridor floors was a painfully dumb thing to do? Here they were taking so much trouble to fly beneath the radar, even hiding out in a falling-apart shithole like this, and it all came completely undone because none of them had figured out that a lighted room was, generally speaking, an occupied one. They might as well have given maps out at the door, or hung up a sign.

Ken thought he’d never stop being amazed by how incredibly stupid smart people could be. He would never have a doctorate in anything and he knew this was stupid…

“Christ,” he muttered to Youji, “these people are goddamn idiots.”  
“Well, nobody actually expects assassins to drop by.”  
“Sure, but if I was making Ebola drugs I’d have the sense to know someone might like to talk to me about it…”  
“If you were making Ebola drugs,” Youji told him, “they wouldn’t work.”

And headed off down the corridor, moving near-soundlessly toward the source of the light. Ken glared at his retreating back, told himself that he knew where Youji slept and he’d get him for it tomorrow, then followed. What else was he supposed to do? They were still on a mission, after all… though, if the targets kept _this_ up, it most likely wouldn’t be a very long one.

The light, bathing the far end of the absurdly long corridor they were slowly making their way down in warm summer-gold, turned out to be spilling from an open doorway. Drawing nearer, moving quiet and careful as a stalking cat, Ken caught the sound of the squeak of a man’s shoes against linoleum; the low murmur of the targets’ desultory conversation and what few actual words he could catch made no sense to him whatsoever; the hiss and gurgle of water running from a faucet and splashing into a sink. The _tick, tick_ of a woman’s heels as she hurried after the man, her footfalls louder by far than those of the two assassins creeping toward her door…

And then, closer still, there was the smell. Sudden and sharp as the cry of a guard, it brought him up short.

Youji drew back, clapping one gloved hand over nose and mouth; Ken pulled a face, nose wrinkled, upper lip drawn back to expose his teeth. It smelled not exactly bad, more like _strange_ : sharp, sweetish and yet somehow abruptly chemical, a smell that scoured the sinuses and went right to the head. A guy could get drunk on that smell, or something very close to it. Ken stumbled back a pace, placed one hand on the wall to steady himself.

“Jesus,” he whispered, “what the Hell are they doing in there?”  
“Maybe she’s doing her nails,” Youji murmured. Then, when Ken merely looked blank: “Acetone, kiddo. I don’t know what’s worse, your understanding of science or your understanding of women.”

And what did that have to do with it? Ken glared at him – Christ, Youji, you could at least _try_ to talk sense! – then, as Youji stood hesitating by the doorway as if he were wondering if he should go in, pushed past him and, ready or not, into the room.

Light. So bright after the corridors it had him squinting, raising one arm to shield his eyes. Ken stopped short, blinking into the glare. What the _Hell_ —it was like something out of a movie in here, all gleaming stainless steel and white surfaces and piles of books and paper and, stood in the center of one of the benches, an array of Bunsen burners caught in a tangle of complicated-looking glassware. Ken stared at it. He couldn’t even have guessed what most of the stuff on the was _called_ , still less what it thought it was for.

Caught about the sides of the glassware and the papers, and almost incidental to them, the figures of a young man and a woman at least ten years his senior. The man’s back was to the door, all his attention on some other piece of science trapped in a glass-fronted cabinet; the woman, bent over a rack of small tubes and scribbling something on a notepad, raised her head and frowned at Ken over the rims of her glasses.

Youji finally made it through the door.

“ _Dammit_ ,” the man was muttering, “fume cupboard’s still on the fritz—”

And the woman stood, the legs of the stool she had sat on scraping against the linoleum. “What,” she demanded, “the _Hell_ are you doing in my laboratory?”

Well, shit.

The man at the fume cupboard started, turned on the spot, the look in his eyes shading from confusion to shock, then finally to alarm. The woman simply gazed at them, her hands planted firmly on the desk and her jaw set. No fear from her: no. Nothing but the righteous anger of a woman interrupted in the middle of something important.

So much for surprise, though he’d blown that one but good the minute he walked in the door. Nothing for it, then… Ken started forward, raising one hand as he bared the claws of his bugnuks: Nishida gave him absolutely nothing. No fear. Not even a momentary flinch. He might as well have shown up with a goddamn water pistol for all she cared. The woman simply held her ground and _if you’re quite finished_ , hereyes seemed to be saying, _I’d like to get on with my work_ – behind her, something moved. Too sudden and too sharp to be anything good, Watanuki moved—

“ _Youji_!” You stupid bastard!

He’d been too busy watching the woman, hadn’t  he? Youji’s head snapped up, he half-turned – found himself staring right down the muzzle of a gun. Ken froze.

“ _Stop_!” Watanuki shouted. “Don’t come any closer!”

And he was smiling. Eyes wide and working their way loose, Watanuki was smiling as he leveled the gun he held in one shaking hand at Youji’s head. Jesus Christ, Ken thought, that thing’s a goddamn _toy_ – nice detailing with nothing to back it up, the kind of .22 pistol favored by idiots who wanted to look cool and precisely nobody else, except for the occasional pro who didn’t need any more gun than that to make their point. Either Watanuki was very, very good or he’d seen too many movies and didn’t have the first idea what he was doing. Ken chose Door Number Two, but an idiot with a gun’s still got a fucking _gun_ —

Ken pushed past Youji and ran. Leapt over the bench, scattering papers and books, casting umpteen thousand yens’ worth of equipment over the bench and to the floor in a madness of breaking glass and spilling chemicals, as he sprung at Watanuki: you’ve got the woman, Youji, now don’t screw this up!

And then he was on him and no time to wonder about what Youji was doing anymore. A sudden sharp _crack_ , so loud and so close it nearly deafened him: Watanuki’s finger had tightened on the trigger as Ken caught him about the midsection, slamming him back hard against the fume cupboard. The little .22 discharged harmlessly over the boy’s shoulder, the bullet burying itself in the ceiling as Ken bore him to the floor, wrestling with him for the pistol.

Don’t screw this up, Hidaka. Just don’t screw this up.  
____

From the darkened corridor Aya had walked down, the glowing golden thread of illumination visible around the four edges of Andou’s office door was only an obvious clue as to his whereabouts. A thin, pale rectangle of light betraying the presence of one of the dark.

Kasamatsu had slammed the door behind him; Aya opened it gently, creeping into Andou’s brightly-lit office suite quiet and deliberate as a father entering the room of his sleeping child. The faintest click of the latch as he closed the door was the only sound he made: one hand on the doorknob, Aya froze. Caught his breath, waiting—

Nothing. He relaxed, slipping away from the door.

Back to the door, his mind elsewhere, the target hadn’t so much as stirred. Professor Andou – in the flesh nothing but another disappointment; just one more unremarkable middle-aged man, stocky and bespectacled and running to fat – stood by the windows with his hands behind his back, watching over the untamed yards. Lost in his thoughts, the target gazed out at too-long grass, swaying back and forth as it was tumbled by the late night wind. A wild night, this.

Andou had heard nothing: he saw the stranger’s figure swim up behind him in the dull reflection cast on the pane of the window, though, and their gazes met in the glass – met and locked and, for a single suspended moment, that was all. Too startled, for a moment, to know how he should have been reacting, Andou’s brown eyes met Aya’s narrowed violet ones, and for all the darkness in the glass had half-swallowed Aya’s reflection, his gaze was still terrible in its focus. The shadows couldn’t conceal Aya’s glare, or the shine of the blade of his katana. A moment, no more – then Andou’s eyes widened and he turned, one hand raised protectively over his chest.

“What do you want?”

Surprised now. Even wrong-footed. No sign of the obscene confidence with which he had handled Kasamatsu. He could turn his back on an angry accomplice, but a pale stranger with a naked sword? Kasamatsu’s anger Andou would have been expecting; Aya – silent, implacable – was an unknown. He yelped and tried to back away when the redhead raised the katana and took a step toward him, but he was already at the window and nowhere to go but to break it and jump, and the fall would have spelt death surely as the stranger in his office did.

“Do you want money?” Andou asked, his words tumbling over one another in his haste. “I have money, you know… I can get more if you let me go home and get it – I have a car outside…”

Aya didn’t want Andou’s car, and had no need of his money. He didn’t so much as break stride as he crossed the dirty, grey-blue carpet, stalking toward the scientist backed against the window – God, how calmly he walked! A madman would have hurried, eager to see blood spilled; a maniac strung the moment out, savoring his victim’s fear. Aya simply walked: he was a man intent on finishing a job, that was all, a man who wanted nothing more than to see the deal concluded. How could Andou have bargained with that?

“What _is_ it? You… just tell me what it is! If it’s not money… the data’s in the laboratories, if you’d just let me—” He broke off, blood draining from his face, biting back a gasp. “What do you _want_ with me, damn you?!”

The maniac would have laughed at that; the madman finished it already. Aya was silent, his face as closed and inhuman as an avenging angel’s as his grip shifted on the hilt of the sword. The Professor’s shoulders were pressed hard against the glass, his face a mask of panic, his gaze fixed on the katana: his back would have been cold. Aya stood a few seconds and a lifetime away, almost close enough to touch – almost.

 “Just tell me what you— Who the _Hell_ do you think you are?”  
“Weiss.” Aya’s voice was as level as his gaze. “The white hunter.”

 Maybe the target understood him, maybe not: Andou’s lips parted as if he wanted to say something more, but there were no words and even like this – a cornered animal, given to animal responses – he was only unremarkable. The blade of the raised katana reflected a slice of Andou’s own face back to him for a split second, and then there was only agony. Andou’s lips opened in a silent scream, his eyes white-rimmed and bulging. Sharp, tearing, excruciating pain for a long moment: after that there was nothing at all.

Such a death was never pretty, but at least it came quick. Professor Andou’s body slid from the blade of the katana and landed on the floor with a heavy thump, blood seeping from the single wound.

Aya shut out the lights.  
____

To Youji’s eyes, there was no such thing as a textbook assassination. But there were good nights with Weiss and there were bad ones, and Tuesday night in the old Akutagawa laboratory was definitely turning into one of the bad ones.

Doctor Yaeko Nishida had never looked harmless. She may have been small and slight and unremarkable, bookish and unathletic in glasses and a white dust coat, but even stood behind the benches with a pen in her hands something about her had suggested, don’t underestimate this one. You never underestimated the ones who seemed to find no fear in dying.

He must have hesitated when he went for her. Youji knew he always would with women, and sensing an opening Nishida took it. She was all sudden motion and quick, lethal grace, everywhere and nowhere at once. He thought he had her for a split second when she paused to catch her breath, but he blew it again – hesitant, always hesitant – and she pivoted like a dancer and caught him a lucky blow in one side that knocked him backward, had him biting back a gasp. How the Hell was he supposed to take this woman down if she wouldn’t stay still long enough for him to do it?

The worst part of it was Youji wasn’t sure he minded. (Dammit, Ken, you _know_ you should have taken the woman!)

It was only luck that had a length of wire looping about one of Nishida’s ankles. Youji pulled her off-balance, she had fallen, landing heavily on one side with a hoarse cry of pain: even that she was equal to. Her fingers scrabbled about her, she snatched at a broken flask that lay by her side and though the shard cut into her fingers, leaving her hands torn and bleeding, she worked at the wire until it snapped, scrambling gracelessly back to her feet as Youji, cursing, coiled the wire back into his watch.

“Children,” she muttered, as if she hardly meant him to hear it. Then, louder, “Get _out_ of my laboratory!”  
“Sorry,” Youji told her; to himself he said, _think of the girls_. A woman who treated women like trash was every inch as contemptible as any man who did the same. “Sorry, Doctor. I can’t do that.”

Seconds out. Round two. He came for her again, the wire gleaming between his fingers; again she moved. Moved forward where he’d thought she’d duck away and, temporarily wrong-footed, Youji took a pace back, instinctively raising his arms; he only realized he must have let go of the wire when he heard it snap back on itself again. Sure he’d been counting on a struggle – since when did the targets come quiet? – but he hadn’t expected a fight! She was a scientist, she was a woman, she was near as dammit twice his age… God _damn_ it, Yaeko Nishida wasn’t supposed to be like this!

The blow caught him in the ribs, just below the solar plexus; it sent him stumbling back a pace. There had been power behind it, far more than he would have expected from a woman like this. Youji was brought up hard when his back struck one of the workbenches, catching him a blow about the waist that left him more startled than hurt. He simply hadn’t considered was that maybe Nishida’s confidence sprung from being damn sure she wasn’t going to die—

“Oh, _shit_.”

Ken. Then the loud, flat _crack_ of the gun.

Oh, God damn. Fighting back a sudden onrush of panic, Youji turned just in time to see the boy throw himself flat. The bullet must have grazed his side as it tore into the monitor of an idling computer. The screen shattered, the monitor exploded; Ken wrapped his arms about his head, crying out sharp and sudden when a shard of burning glass struck his forearm. Electricity crackled, jumping between suddenly broken connections as the shattered computer started to burn, sending plumes of thick, choking black smoke into the already foul-smelling air.

Doctor Nishida must have dropped the floor when Ken did and now she made a break for it, crawling behind one of the benches to hide. Youji, all his attention on the man with the gun, let her go – at least for now. Cursing, stumbling away from the burning computer, Watanuki was casting about himself for Ken, wiping at his stinging eyes: the boy was already on his feet, springing for him sudden and soundless and Christ, the idiot had left himself wide open again!

“Ken!”

Wasn’t listening, was he?

Watanuki screamed. Screamed and lashed out wildly and desperately at his attacker, knocking Ken backward and into a cabinet of glassware which crashed to the ground, the doors bursting open to strew flasks and beakers and test tubes both shattered and whole all over the floor. Dazed and aching, shards of glass caught in the folds of his jacket and gleaming in his dark hair, Ken pushed himself back to his knees and clambered unsteadily to his feet, only to find himself staring straight down the barrel of Watanuki’s little .22.

“Ken!” Youji cried again. God _dammit_ , Hidaka, what the _Hell_ were you thinking?!  
Watanuki grinned, terrible and twisted, the smile of a child torturing a cat. “ _Got_ you!”  
“Oh, fuck off!” Ken shouted and, heedless of the gun, punched him.

A soft _click_ just before the blow struck home told a tale of blades slipping into place; the too-bright lights caught, for an instant, on the metal of Ken’s bugnuk claws.

Watanuki howled in sudden pain, staggering backward. The gun flew from his hands and skittered across the floor to rest in the shadows as he reached for his damaged face, blood flowing warm and thick between his fingers as he pressed them to his cheeks. Stumbling, he half-turned, his wild gaze searching, frantic.

“Yaeko!” he shouted, and for all his pain and his panic, he sounded angry. “Yaeko, you _promised_ —!”

He got no further. Ken pressed his advantage. As Youji watched, the boy’s bugnuk claws caught Watanuki across the back and side, ripping him almost in two. Blood spattered across Ken’s face and arms as Watanuki stiffened, muscles going into spasm. For a moment he stood there, eyes bulging and lips parted in a silent scream, then the scientist’s arms fell to his sides, his legs went slack and he pitched bonelessly forward, blood leaking from the terrible tears scored across body and face. Still, silent and spent.

Ken stepped away, giving Youji a helpless smile – then flinched at the sudden soft _click_ of metal on metal. The sound of the hammer being drawn back on a gun.

Nishida. Nishida, standing by the broken fume cupboard and leveling the little .22 at Ken’s head, regarding him coolly down the length of the barrel, her bloodstained fingers leaving smears along the grip. The boy took a pace back, dark eyes wide: Youji cursed fluently and creatively. Cursed Ken for not keeping a better eye on the situation and letting his guard drop as soon as Watanuki was out of the picture, cursed himself for turning his back on the goddamn woman in the first place. Out of the frying pan into the same identical frying pan, only this time, with Nishida halfway across the room, there was no way for Ken to fight back…

At least, with Watanuki lying dead at Ken’s feet, all Nishida’s attention was on him. All Youji could hope for was that the woman was every bit as bad as she seemed and wouldn’t simply shoot the kid dead where he stood. Moving slowly, taking care not to draw attention to himself, he reached for the catch that freed the wire from his watch.

Stall her, Youji thought frantically, hoping against hope that Ken would somehow get the message. Be stubborn, be obstructive… dammit, be _yourself_ , kiddo, you’re _good_ at that. I don’t care how you do it, Ken, just _stall_ her—

“Now then,” Nishida said: oh, so she _did_ want to talk. Youji relaxed. Thank you, Doctor, you just bought us both some time. “Would youcare to tell me what you think you’re doing in my laboratory?”  
Ken laughed. Startled, Youji could tell, perhaps simply by the question itself. “Go to Hell.”  
Nishida shook her head, clicked her tongue. “Stubborn,” she sighed. “I suppose I should have expected it. But I think you misunderstand me. I wasn’t asking if you _wanted_ to tell me why you came here, but if it’s the data you’re after, I’m afraid you’re going to have to—”

Nishida broke off. She yelped in surprise and pain as a length of deceptively fine wire wrapped itself tightly about the muzzle of the gun and it was yanked forcefully from her hand. She drew a sharp breath, drawing back her hand as if it had been scalded, as Youji’s own fingers closed about the butt of the .22.

“Youji!”

Looked like Nishida hadn’t been the only one who hadn’t seen that coming. Ken was gazing at him, and the look in his eyes was an admixture of confusion and of sheer relief. “Damn, Ken,” Youji said teasingly, “but you’ve got one Hell of a knack for getting yourself in deep, haven’t you?”

Cutting the wire about the gun, letting the rest snap back inside his watch, Youji tossed the gun back to Ken. The boy caught it one-handed, giving Youji a questioning look as he did, but guessing correctly what his teammate was hoping he’d do with it. Tugging off his gloves – heavy, clumsy things, far too much so to allow him to use a pistol with any degree of accuracy – Ken aimed the gun at Nishida, keeping her covered as Youji readied the wire. And he hesitated, he would always hesitate, but it was only to think of the others. Of all the poor women who’d swallowed the poison Nishida had pushed on them, of Omi’s classmate who’d only wanted to be pretty and had paid for it with her life…

And for a moment it had all seemed possible but, before Youji could take more than a step toward their cornered prey, the balance of power shifted again.  
____

There were no two ways about it: it was well past time to end this.

The meeting had been good for nothing. Another ridiculous waste of time, half an hour in the car at the end of another busy day just to stand seething in a dilapidated office while Andou hectored him as if he were a college professor and Kasamatsu an underperforming undergrad. Well, no more, Kasamatsu told himself as he hurried down the empty, echoing corridors, past the windblown garden and toward the overgrown lot where he’d left his car. Another hour or so and he’d be home – home for good, he promised himself. No more hours wasted in this rotting carcass of a building; no more dour, uncompromising Nishida or Watanuki smirking at her elbow; no more Morimasa Andou.

He’d tried to reason with Andou; Andou hadn’t listened. Too caught up in his little science project. Serve the Professor right if he _did_ start freezing him out. Maybe then the stubborn old fool would understand that when Kasamatsu had told him he wanted out, he had meant every word.

The police were taking an interest, the news weeklies were catching on. Business was suffering, the stakeholders were getting restless; his wife was distant and resentful, convinced the string of late nights and the lame excuses that followed them were signs of an affair; he’d caught Akari with a box of Andou’s goddamn poison pills and what the Hell had he been supposed to _say_ to her? She was thirteen years old, for crying out loud, she shouldn’t even be _thinking_ about things like that yet! And then there’d been those men a day or so back…

No, it couldn’t go on. _Had to end this._ Finish it and move on before the signs got even worse.

It was perhaps all the more disheartening because Andou had been a friend. Not a good friend, admittedly; they’d been close as students, the professor had even been a guest at his wedding, but in middle age they’d drifted apart. He hadn’t heard from Andou in over ten years when the professor approached him with the proposition.

Money he had, but it hadn’t really been money that Andou was offering. Simply, Kasamatsu had been bored.

And now? Now he was bored again, bored and compromised and all Andou had to give him was _the experiment must go on_. Something about needing more data or a change in the formula—

To Hell with the damned experiment! What about his company? What about all the business he’d had to turn down, all of it totally legitimate, all for the sake of Andou and his poison pills? Wasn’t even like the old bastard was paying him properly for all the time and trouble he was taking. He’d taken the loss and sucked it up but how much longer was he supposed to all but pay Andou for the privilege of getting Charme onto the shelves? What, Kasamatsu was thinking, about my goddamn _daughter_?

If Kasamatsu had even heard the footfalls behind him, saw a shadow playing on a wall where no shadow should have fallen, he might easily have told himself that it was Andou – Andou or, worse, Watanuki, come to try and charm him back onside. Well they could try all they wanted: Kasamatsu had seen quite enough of Andou’s particular brand of charm to last him a lifetime. The deal, he told himself as he pushed open the verdigrised laboratory doors, was off.  
____

Which was about where Omi came in, of course.

The mission had been a quiet one so far, at least for him. If the spot Omi had found himself – the second-floor balcony of an outbuilding, hidden almost completely in welcoming shadow – hadn’t been quite the perfect vantage point, the sightlines were good enough and the view of the front of the building clear enough that it made no odds. Objective: watch the doors. Maybe the others would take down the targets inside, maybe they wouldn’t – and that, of course, was about where Omi came in.

There wasn’t much for him to see. Just the decaying laboratory – apparently, from where he was standing, entirely cold and dead: little more than another abandoned building nobody had quite gotten around to pulling down yet – with Kasamatsu’s sleek black car parked untidily out front. These targets hardly seemed the sort to try to flee on foot, and with their only vehicle safely where he could see it Weiss had their escape routes pretty cleanly cut off. Crossbow in hand, wide blue eyes scanning the building focused and tireless as a camera, Omi waited. Maybe waiting for nothing, but that was no reason to drop his guard.

Exactly what he was doing when someone, walking that one bit too quickly to be casual, pushed open the laboratory doors. Gazing, all deadly focus, at the front of the laboratory, crossbow leveled and waiting only for an opening.

Grey suit. Salt-and-pepper hair. Dark skin bleached a sickly shade by the overhead lights. _Target—_

And the click of the trigger, and the snap of the bowstring.

Kasamatsu hadn’t even had time to lift his hand from the door. One second, perhaps two, and the target’s knees were buckling as he pitched forward onto his face and collapsed into a crumpled heap by the doors, one hand still stretched above him as if to reach for the handle. He died without so much as a cry.

A dart springing to his fingers so sudden he could have palmed it, Omi watched for a moment longer before jumping from the balcony. Landing near-silently, the boy slipped quick and quiet from shadow to shadow as he darted across the yard to the fallen man’s side. An entirely needless precaution: Omi could tell at a glance that his aim had been true. Pierced clean through the heart, Kasamatsu had been dead before his body had finished falling. Probably never even knew what hit him.

Footfalls. Leaving Kasamatsu where he lay, Omi slipped quick and neat back into the shadows, the dart poised and readied for a throw: he stepped cautiously back out again when he caught sight of Aya, sword in hand.  He smiled.

“Is everything all right, Aya-kun?”  
Aya nodded. He didn’t return the smile, but then he wouldn’t have done if they’d been standing in the shop. “Andou’s dead.”  
“Good,” Omi said, tucking the dart back in its case. Then, “I think maybe we should hide this one. Someone might see him from the street… I suppose it can’t be helped about the car.”

Aya nodded again. Acknowledging the sense in it, or maybe simply acknowledging that he’d heard. Bending to the dead man Aya caught him beneath the arms, dragging the corpse back into the laboratory while Omi, eyes on the street, stood lookout. Kasamatsu had bled a little, onto the front of his shirt, but when Aya returned less than a minute later there was nothing to suggest the body had ever been there.

“Where did you leave him?”  
“Behind the reception desk,” Aya replied.

Well, it couldn’t be helped; the car was right there. The laboratory would be the first place they searched whatever happened. Scrubbing at the concrete with the toe of one sneakered foot (he didn’t _think_ therewas a drag mark, but it never hurt to be sure) Omi asked, “And the others?”  
“Still in the laboratories.” At least, the redhead’s expression suggested, I haven’t seen anything to suggest otherwise.

Still? Omi blinked, raising his head. Well… he supposed it was a pretty large laboratory for just four people, and Weiss hadn’t been here _that_ long. Maybe Youji and Ken had run into a bit more trouble actually _finding_ their targets than Aya had looking for Andou. Shivering slightly – they were pretty close to the bay out here and it was, after all, a windy night – Omi pulled his flimsy jackets more tightly about his body, glancing around and half-hoping in spite of himself that he’d see one of the others picking his way across the lot to join them. It didn’t work like that, of course. It never had.

__

“Well,” he said aloud, “they’ll probably be done soon, right, Aya-kun?”

Privately he added, _five minutes and we’re going back in_.

Two minutes dragged past, then a third; Omi shifted from foot to foot, squinting into the shadows. What in the world was keeping the others? They’d have called in if they’d come up against anything _really_ bad, wouldn’t they? Of course they would. Or Youji would have, if he got the chance to. Maybe they really _had_ justhad trouble finding the target…

The cough of a car engine spluttering into reluctant life, too close at hand to be explained away as nothing, cut across his thoughts. What in the—

Omi’s head snapped round. He stared wide-eyed at Kasamatsu’s black sedan, stood empty and silent as before, then over his shoulder in the direction the noise had come. There’d been another car? But I didn’t even _see it_! By his side, he felt Aya tense, one hand going for the hilt of his katana; the redhead didn’t move. He didn’t even try to. A door slammed, the car pulled away, tires squealing as it accelerated away from the laboratory; for a moment all Omi could seem to make himself think was _oh, no_.

“Aya-kun,” he heard himself say, “you said the target was dead…”  
“He is,” Aya replied, his voice tight.

And knowing that told them nothing, and got them nowhere at all.


	5. Verloren: Unfinished business

They wore black.

They were a unit, the strangers, they were two halves of a harmonious whole. Stood side-by-side at the top of a short flight of metal stairs leading to an emergency door, their very different faces identical twins for cool, even studied indifference, they were the kind of men who elevated anonymity to an art form. Though they looked nothing alike – the one dark and thin-faced, not much more than thirty; the other a foreigner several years his senior, blue-eyed and fair-haired as a storybook American – they were the same. Men like that were always tall, always broad in the shoulders and sturdy; they always wore black.

Bodyguards, Ken thought: some things just went without saying. But whose bodyguards and what the Hell were they doing in this shithole of a building? Not that he was in any position to ask them anything, these blank-faced strangers with their suits and their close-cut hair, and the guns that made Watanuki’s .22 look like the toy it so nearly was.

“Good timing.”

Nishida. Cool as ever and smiling – smiling a tight, smug little smile as if he was doing no more than point a finger at her. His finger tightened about the trigger of the gun, his eyes narrowed: if it hadn’t been for the guys on the stairs he’d have shot her then and there.

“I believe you could say that,” the foreigner said: his accent was strong, and he picked his words with the pedantic care of a man speaking a language he still didn’t quite understand. He nodded at the woman then, turning to Youji and Ken, he added, “You should stand still, please.”  
_Please_? Ken bridled. What was with this guy’s attitude? “What the Hell do you think you’re doing?”“We are here for the Doctor.”  
“That’s a coincidence,” Youji said, pushing his sunglasses back up his nose. “But I’m afraid we saw her first…”  
“Please,” The foreigner said, “we mean no unpleasantness. We merely wish to take the Doctor. Could you put down that small gun please, boy?”

For a moment Ken simply stood, gripping the pistol so tightly his fingers ached, his palms damp against the grip. The little .22 might have been enough gun for him if he concentrated and his luck held, but the strangers’ .38s would have been more than enough for them even if they hadn’t been holding them like they knew exactly what to do with them. Whoever’d given them those things hadn’t want anyone even _thinking_ it, but Ken was thinking it all the same. He could take the foreigner if he aimed for the eye and the gun didn’t misfire; he wouldn’t be able to take them both whatever he did. Wouldn’t even come close with this thing. He might as well shoot Youji then shove the gun under his jaw as try anything with these guys…

 “Ken,” Youji murmured, and it was a warning.

It was a bad trade. The worst. If it had just been him then maybe, but there was Youji, too— Gritting his teeth, hissing a curse, Ken lowered the gun. Flicking the safety on he placed it carefully down on the floor, then kicked it behind him. At least Nishida wouldn’t get it, where it had gone. What was there to do next but straighten, hands loose by his sides and his fingers curling into fists, and gaze up at the strangers on the staircase from beneath lowered brows and tangled bangs, and wait for whatever happened next to happen?

 “Thank you,” the foreigner said. “That wasn’t so very difficult, was it?”  
Ken simply glared at the man, not trusting himself to speak; from somewhere beside him, Youji laughed dryly. “You could say that.”  
“Doctor.” The dark one broke his silence and his voice, perfectly level and deeper than Ken had been expecting, was like a surprise. “This way.”

Nishida nodded briskly, snatching a pile of disks and folders and papers from the desk and hurrying up the stairs clutching them to her chest. The two men stepped aside as she darted up the fire stairs two at a time, hesitating by the door to give her would-be murderers one last, flat stare. The Japanese bodyguard looked down at her and nodded, placing one hand on her shoulder as he hurried her back out the door; the blond kept them covered as the night swallowed their last target whole.

Ken was reckless, but he wasn’t stupid. He might have snatched for the gun, put a bullet in Nishida’s back, except he knew he’d never reach it. This smirking foreign bastard would shoot him dead on the spot for even daring to think it, and then he’d kill Youji, too...

 That didn’t mean he was going to stay quiet. “Where are you taking her?”  
“Somewhere she’ll be safe,” the foreigner said. Where you people won’t find her – he didn’t need to add that. Some things went without saying.  
“Safe?” Youji echoed. “A woman like that, and you want her _safe_?”  
“But of course we do. Verwandlung—” the German word rolled off his tongue, far more smoothly than his Japanese had done, “—believes in protecting its investments.”  
“Who?” Ken couldn’t keep the question back. “Who the hell are Ver… _those_ guys?”  
The man smiled again, and it looked wrong. Quite a smiler, this foreigner with his too-wide eyes and his shock of pale hair, and his smiles would always look wrong. “Never you mind.”

And that, it seemed, was that.

____

Verwandlung was German for Metamorphosis: that was all Omi had been able to offer them. A German called Franz Kafka wrote a book called _die_ _Verwandlung_ once, about a man who turned into an insect, which Omi supposed was interesting enough but wasn’t very helpful…

“Why does he turn into a beetle?” Ken asked.  
“I don’t know, Ken-kun. Probably it’s some kind of metaphor…”  
Ken blinked. “Well, what’s the point? It’s stupid. The whole thing’s just plain dumb.”

Aside from that it meant nothing at all, and _that_ meant Nishida was gone.

It worried Omi. It worried him a lot more than he would have liked to admit. He’d struggled with the mission report even as he tried for his teammates’ sake to put the best spin on how it had gone as he possibly could, and submitted it shamefacedly. All he felt, when Manx reported back that Kritiker were satisfied that Charme was no longer a danger with its creator and distributor eliminated and they were counting the mission as a success, was guilty and slightly sick. He’d cheated on an assignment and the teacher had been right all along: sure, he’d gotten away with it, but he’d still cheated himself.

True, she hadn’t been the main target. He himself hadn’t so much as laid eyes on her. But knowing that Kritiker had marked Nishida for death and Weiss had failed to deliver still left Omi feeling profoundly uneasy even before anyone so much as mentioned Verwandlung.

It was no comfort at all to know he wasn’t the only one who was feeling it. Youji, sat propped up behind the register idly toying with a flower, looked more pensive than languid; Aya, even more than usual, kept his distance. Ken? Ken was thinking too hard with the end result being an entirely uncharacteristic display of physical awkwardness. They were all puzzled, all guilty, with the difference being only in the proportions of one to another. Omi felt predominantly guilty. It had been his mission and therefore his mistake. If he’d just gone to check up on the others a little sooner…

 And that brought him back to Verwandlung, and who or what were they? What did they want with his target?

“Omi.” Ken waved one hand in front of his face. “Hey. You’re spacing.”  
“Oh… Sorry, Ken-kun.”  
“Don’t be sorry,” Ken said, “just don’t do it in the middle of the damn shop or someone’s gonna walk into you!”

From the look on Ken’s face, that _someone_ had very nearly been him and it was no hypothetical at all. Omi very nearly apologized again, but Ken saved him the trouble by walking away, catching his hip on the side of the table as he went. Omi winced, partly in sympathy, partly at… well, he just wished Ken wouldn’t curse like that in the store, that was all.

“I’m going for a cigarette,” Youji announced.

Omi merely nodded. It hardly seemed worth pointing out to Youji that he’d only gotten back from a smoke break a half-hour ago.

Youji left. Ken came back, still muttering under his breath, carrying a roll of wrapping paper. Aya, his back to the body of the shop, was busying himself tending to a shelf-full of miniature roses and Omi, finding himself a seat at the central table (this counts as out the way, right, Ken-kun?) joined a couple of whispering schoolgirls in watching him work for a moment. Aya, he knew, was no happier about what had happened on the mission than the rest of them. He was just better at not letting it show. Whatever that meant, Omi still couldn’t help wishing he was more like that.

“You look blue.”

Omi started. Man, that made him jump! Thank goodness he hadn’t been holding anything or he’d have been looking at five minutes on his hands and knees sweeping potting compost out of the cracks between the tiles. He scrambled to his feet, schooling a polite shopkeeper’s smile onto his face.

“Ah, sorry, sorry! I guess I didn’t see you there, can I…”

He’d been going somewhere with that. He had to have been. Omi just couldn’t remember where, that was all. He was looking at a girl of about his own age, a girl with pale skin and a head of blue-black curls, with a playful, almost teasing smile on her lips and if it wasn’t exactly like looking at Ouka then it was close, it was very, very damn close. Oh, there were false notes – a red-and-black uniform; pale blue eyes; the harsh Osaka twang to her voice – but to Omi they were nothing. They weren’t even there.

Thankfully, she didn’t seem to have noticed his expression. That or she just didn’t care. “Did you guys argue?” she was asking. “My friends said you were all acting kinda off so I figured I’d come see what was up. That’s them over there, they’re the ones dying of embarrassment.” She grinned, pointing to a couple of girls stood by the door gazing straight at them and whispering furiously.

“Huh?” Omi blinked. Chased the smile back from wherever it had gotten off too. “Oh… no, it’s nothing like that. We’re all just kind of tired today, so please tell your friends not to worry.  
“Really?” The girl frowned. “You all get tired at the same time? That’s kinda weird… oh, hang on a sec.” She turned, waving to the girls by the door. Called, “See? I told you it was nothing!”  
Omi smiled, and at least the smile was genuine. “It’s really not that interesting,” he said easily. “We were up late last night stock-taking, and it always takes longer than you think it will.”  
“I suppose it must be tiring, running a shop?”  
“Well, it can be. But there are plenty of worse jobs. Forgive me for not asking this sooner, but is there anything I can help you with?”  
“Help me?” The girl blinked, then giggled. “Oh, you mean the flowers? Oh, man, I… this is kinda embarrassing, but my friends bought me here. See, I just moved here… so they said they had to bring me here. You know I don’t think they were planning on buying _any_ thing but I feel pretty bad, you know? I mean, this _is_ a shop… and here we are hanging out like we’re at the _park_ or something!”  
It did sound pretty funny, put like that. “I have an idea,” Omi said with a smile. “I could fix you something simple. That won’t be too expensive, and you don’t have to feel bad.”  
“Really? That’s a great idea!” The girl said with a grin. “And I’ll make them buy me cake afterward, to pay me back. So, Mr. Shopkeeper, what do you recommend?”  
“Well, let’s see…”

 Omi led the girl over to a range of plastic pots containing cut flowers, guiding her attention toward a selection of carnations – red, yellow, peach, white and pink, their fragile petals tipped with only the slightest hint of color or bright as the hues of a child’s paint box. For a moment the girl seemed to hesitate, then she broke out in that infectious grin again as she spotted the red ones, carefully drawing a bunch from the water.

“How about these?”  
“Those?” Omi asked. “You must really like red.”  
“It’s been my favorite color since I was little,” the girl said. Lowering her head she sniffed at the carnations, only to look up again in disappointment. “Oh. They don’t smell of anything.”  
“If you’d prefer scented flowers—”  
“It’s fine!” Snatching another bouquet from the pot, she thrust the flowers at him, the bottom of their stems dripping and dark with water. “These’ll be great. Oh, you don’t have any of that white stuff, do you?” White stuff? Omi’s confusion must have shown on his face, because the girl huffed in exasperation. “You know, those flowers! People put them with carnations. They’re like these tiny little cottony things. White stuff.”  
“You mean gypsophila?” Omi asked, glancing toward a pot full of sprays of the tiny powder-puff flowers. “We’ve got plenty of gypsophila, if you’d like it…”  
The girl followed his gaze; she nodded. “That’s the stuff. Can you do something pretty with that?”

Of course he could. Picking up a few sprays of gypsophila, Omi headed back over to the central table to make up the bouquet, the girl following him from a discreet distance. Maybe it was just his imagination, but there seemed to be something… well, something a little strangein the way that she was looking at him. No, not just looking at him: in the entire way she’d been. Girls – at least the ones who chose to spend their evenings hanging out in the _Koneko_ – simply weren’t like this one was. There was something different about her, something he wasn’t entirely sure he trusted.

Something he trusted even less, as soon as she started speaking again.

“You guys aren’t here every day, are you?”

Omi looked up from wrapping the flowers, his hands stilling on the stalks. Yes, there was definitely something strange about this girl. She was entirely too observant. “Well,” he said carefully, “actually I’m still a high-school student, so I only really work evenings and weekends…”  
“I mean all of you,” the girl said, her pale eyes fixed intently on his face. “My friends said it’s unusual for you all to just be here like this. Do you guys have other jobs?”  
  
Other jobs? What kind of a question was that? Omi hesitated for a second, just that, sorting through the possible answers; Ken, stood nearby, looked quickly over at them then just as quickly turned away again. He must have caught at least part of that. He must have been hoping he’d heard it wrong. 

“Oh, no,” Omi said. “It’s nothing like that. The job just takes us away from the shop every so often. We run our own deliveries and we do events… and then there’s breaks and days off and things like that to take into account. It’s only when it gets busy they really need all four of us here.”  
“Huh. I guess I didn’t think of that. What kind of stuff do you do?”  
“Well, weddings for one,” Omi said, looking up briefly from the flowers and flashing her the smile again. “Or formal dinners… sometimes we do things like big parties, too. Would you like ribbon?”  
“Just paper’s fine.”

And she smiled back, but now that Omi thought about it perhaps there was something a little odd about that, too.

She didn’t linger over paying for the flowers. Omi watched as, giving him a cheerful farewell, the girl hurried back over to her friends, thrusting the bouquet into one of the girls’ arms; he watched as the little group drifted back out into the streets and lost themselves in the early-evening crowds. He wondered if she’d come back, and almost hoped she wouldn’t. Whatever was so strange about her it was nothing he could put his finger on – who knew, maybe she was just an observant girl. It didn’t feel like that was the answer, though. Something about her was just… it was _off_.

“What is it with us and weird women?” Ken asked. He must have been watching the girl leave too, hands on his hips, brows lowered. “She was…” He hesitated, groping for a word; found only a disconcertingly inadequate one. “ _Strange_.”  
“Like the girl from the other day,” Omi said. “Don’t you think?”  
“Moth. Yeah. Why do we never meet anyone normal, that’s what I want to know.” Shaking his head, he wandered over to the cut flowers, rearranging the red carnations in an attempt to mask the gap the girl had left.  
 “You were right, Ken-kun.”

Omi hadn’t meant to be overheard. He’d spoken to the countertop, and quietly enough that his friend could easily have ignored it: when Ken raised his head from the flowers he was fussing over to gaze at him over one shoulder, his dark eyes frankly curious, it was a surprise.

“Right?” Ken asked. “What was I _right_ about, Omi?”  
“She wasn’t like Ouka at all.”

____

  
“We are truly ashamed and sorry for the terrible events of the last few weeks.”

The President had written the speech. Such times – or so Yamanouchi had it – were times for a CEO to step forward and take responsibility: even more importantly to be _seen_ to do so, to take decisive action in the face of a scandal. Now was not the moment to cower in the shadows and hope that it all blew over.

This wasn’t going to blow over.

 No, Yamanouchi had said firmly to the members of the board, to the Chief Science Officer and the Vice President and the PR men. No, gentlemen, thank you. I’ll brief the press myself—

“Last night I was informed by the directors that a batch of one of our newest products, the slimming aid _Charme_ which has been on market trial in the Tokyo area, had been tampered with before it reached the shelves. The tampering, which the police believe to be the work of the late Professor Morimasa Andou, resulted in the illness, and in some cases in the deaths, of dozens of innocent women and girls. Words cannot express how shocked and appalled we all were to learn of Professor Andou’s actions, and how truly we are sorry for the pain and suffering they have caused.”

Even then it had felt like a brave thing to want to do: walking into the lecture theater they’d chosen to hold the press conference in, it seemed to Nakayama like sheer insanity. Blame the noise, blame the press of the bodies, packed too tight for the room, the mingled, sickly scents of perfumes and aftershaves and sweat. Blame Andou for dying like that and the people of Tokyo for clamoring for details about how a missing scientist should have come to be murdered by a faceless maniac with a sword in an abandoned laboratory, a laboratory full of boxes of one of their drugs.

There was no doubt about it: the business with Andou and Charme was going to come out somehow. The only thing left to do was run damage control. They could tell the truth, or half of it, and hope it would be good enough that nobody – no grieving relatives or too-curious reporters out to make names for themselves –  tried to look any deeper. Nobody credible, at any rate: the kooks would think what they liked, but then they always did.

Brave or not, it was the only option Yamanouchi had left.

“We know there is nothing that we can do to reverse the terrible cost of the Professor’s misdeeds, but we assure you, our customers and stakeholders, that Tellus Pharmaceuticals will do everything within our power to help in this difficult time. All products that may have been effected will be withdrawn from sale pending an independent review, and will not be returned to sale until such time as they are conclusively proven safe. We will be introducing new tamper-proof packaging for all our products, and are in the process of negotiating with our distributors to ensure they can never fall into the hands of those who would misuse them again. We are also setting in motion a stringent internal review to determine if any of our own employees may have abetted Andou. Tellus Pharmaceuticals intend to co-operate fully with any investigation and if anyone within the company is found to have played the smallest part in the Professor’s crimes, we will see that they are punished to the full extent of the law.”

So the President had written the speech, and there was Nakayama, stepping out onto the stage in Yamanouchi’s wake. He dropped his head slightly, stepped back as Yamanouchi strode to the podium. Not much, not so much that the crowd would think the President unguarded, but just enough to allow himself to slip into the background. He was simply the bodyguard, and he wasn’t there at all

He’d heard the speech before, of course. In the President’s office, in the tiny backstage area as Yamanouchi restlessly paced the floor and waited to be told, _it’s time_. The speech was nothing, it was drizzle: Nakayama, eyes hidden behind a pair of dark glasses, restlessly scanned the room for anything that might indicate that _here was trouble_ and like it or not on some level he was expecting it. It wasn’t just reporters and camera crews who were out there right now: it was the families of the victims.

All of them looking for someone to blame…

“We at Tellus take our responsibilities to our customers seriously, and we know that in allowing such a horrible thing to happen we have let you all down. We as a company must do everything within our power to ensure that such a tragedy can never occur again. Once again, we are truly sorry to those who have suffered as a result of our failings, and to their families and friends. We would urge all of you who have been effected by these horrifying events to contact us so that Tellus Pharmaceuticals can provide you with the support and assistance you require, and determine how best to compensate you for your losses.”

Well, it wasn’t going to be Yamanouchi and Tellus. Dead men were convenient that way. Alive, the Professor had been a useful ally. Well, he could be useful one more time.

And there was President Yamanouchi – hands grasping the sides of the lectern, head slightly lowered, as if in discomfiture or shame – stood before a thicket of microphones, in the middle of a fusillade of popping flashbulbs, and saying all the right things. It was a masterful performance really. Told like this, Nakayama thought, it could almost have been true after all…

“Ever since our company was founded, all of us here at Tellus have prided ourselves in providing safe and effective products to people in need. Last night I learned how very badly we had failed in that aim. Nothing is more important to us than regaining the trust of you, our valued customers. We know that such a thing will take time, and will not be given so readily again. But we hope you will give us the opportunity, in future, to provide once again the top-quality products that you expect and deserve. Thank you.”

It sounded wonderful. It would change nothing.

The project would continue as planned.

____

Okay, so a target had vanished. If there was more to it than that, Ken was sure someone would tell him. For his own part he decided, after thinking it over, not to worry about it. If Nishida was still dangerous she’d show up again sooner or later and Weiss could finish what they started. If she wasn’t, they’d never hear from her again. Either way it wasn’t worth losing sleep over, though of course that hadn’t stopped Omi for a moment even before Manx had mentioned – strongly implying that they should do likewise – that Kritiker were going to be looking into that Ver… the group with the funny name.

“Omi? What’s up?”

He’d thought the shop floor was looking kind of empty. Just over an hour to close and, leaving Youji propping up the counter (she was a blonde this time), Ken had gone to find the broom because anything he didn’t have to do after they closed up was good with him and it wasn’t like there was anything else to do. What he’d got was Omi in the break room bent intently over a notebook. The weird thing was that it didn’t seem to have anything written on it.

“Oh, uh… it’s nothing really, Ken-kun. I was just… well, you know what happened last week.”  
“Again?” Ken sighed. “Hey, _Omi_ , come on. Either she shows up again or she doesn’t and if she don’t…  well, for all we know she ain’t even in the country anymore. I wouldn’t be. The— well, it’s done, right?”  
“Maybe not, Ken.”

Aya. Separating himself from the break room wall, uncrossing his arms from his chest, Aya walked over to the table, stubbing out a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. Amazing how inconspicuous a tall redhead in a ridiculous sweater and a bright green apron could make himself if he wanted to, really.

“Huh? What’d you mean?”  
“You know, Ken-kun,” Omi said, “I was just talking with Aya-kun and we think… well, there’ve been a lot of rather odd things happening lately, haven’t there? The mission, this _Verwandlung_ group, what happened to Sayu-san… maybe even that girl you met. Well, what if they’re all connected?”  
“Connected?” Ken echoed. He must have blinked. “That’s reaching a bit, don’t you think?”  
Omi shook his head. He tapped the pen on the edge of his notepad. “Maybe not,” he said, and he had that look on his face again, the one that said he’d been thinking things. Ken wondered if anyone had told the kid this wasn’t actually a mission. “It wouldn’t be that odd if a lot of little things happening together all turned out to be part of the same big thing, right, Aya-kun?”

Aya might have nodded, but probably hadn’t. Ken didn’t bother turning to check. He was far too busy staring at Omi and wondering, am I the _only_ person here who thinks this sounds totally nuts?

“And then what?” He asked. “We’ve got a mad scientist with a load of Ebola pills, some group of whackos with a name nobody can say, and a girl with dehydration. That don’t add up to di— and a drug company, right. You think you can get something out of all that good luck trying, but you’re on your own.”

Fill in the comeback yourself, I guess. Sure Omi wasn’t going to say anything, but Ken had a horrible feeling he was thinking it. Whoops, probably time to make himself scarce.

Except now _he_ was thinking it too, wasn’t he? The problem with thoughts like that was they were horribly contagious. There Ken was in the shop de-thorning roses because God knew Youji wasn’t about to risk his fingers doing it and dammit but he’d caught himself wondering if maybe Omi was right after all. There really _was_ a lot of weirdness going round, and what were the chances that it was going to stop dead just because Professor Andou was out of the picture? Sure, the drug company guys had said they didn’t know anything about what he’d been up to with their pills but that was exactly what Ken would have said in that situation, if he’d been a bit of a bastard—

“Hey. Wake _up_ , Hidaka.”

Youji. Ken started as the blond snapped his fingers in front of his face. He dropped the rose, the knife slipped: he flinched, hissing in sudden pain. Great, so he’d wrecked a perfectly decent pair of gardening gloves and now his hand was bleeding. Did it matter that he’d been hurt far worse than this before? It goddamn well _hurt_! Ken raised his head, gave Youji the nastiest look he could scare up on a moment’s notice. Nothing was worth this.

“ _Ow_! Dammit Youji look what you made me do!”

“What did I make you do?” Youji asked, raising his eyebrows in surprise as Ken stripped off his glove, cursing under his breath. “Oh, for… Don’t tell me you’ve cut yourself? How in the world did you manage that?”  
“What’d you mean,” Ken retorted, “how’d _I_ do that? I was doing just fine before you came along!”  
Youji sighed. Shook his head. “Ken, it’s not my fault you’re an accident waiting to happen. Why aren’t you using a rose stripper?”  
“Because _someone_ put the goddamn rose stripper _down somewhere_ and it wasn’t me, what’d you want Youji and it’d better be good.”  
“It’s good,” Youji said. He smiled, gesturing down the road, and Ken followed his gaze, trying to work out what he was looking at. “Look. Those two girls over there—”  
“That’s it? You’ve seen a girl?” You made me slice open my hand over _that_? Ken spared Youji an aggrieved look, turning back to the arrangement and sucking on his cut. Ow. “You—” he began, then lifted his hand away and tried again. “Hey. If you’re not gonna work, Kudou, you could at least let me do some. And if you’re just gonna stand round staring at girls, get me a plaster!”  
“Say please,” Youji said, grinning infuriatingly, “and I’ll consider it, Kenken.”  
“Stop calling me that!”  
Youji clicked his tongue, chidingly. “Temper, temper. If you’ll only let me finish, all will be revealed. As I was about to say, take a look at those two girls across the road. See the tall one? Now, I could be wrong about this—“ except of course I’m not, “—but she looks exactly like Moth.”

Moth?

Dammit, he shouldn’t have been interested. He should have told Youji to shove it and gotten back to the arrangement he was neglecting but, a frown on his face, Ken looked round almost in spite of himself. Now that he thought about it there were two girls, one short and dark, the other taller and fairer and weirdly familiar, deep in angry conversation as they waited at a crosswalk. All right, so Youji’d found some women, now who the Hell was—oh, of course. _That_ Moth. The girl with the sore feet who wouldn’t let them call her an ambulance.

And there he’d been thinking Youji’s talent for identifying women by their figures was just the world’s most useless superpower.

“It looks like her,” he said finally. Then, “What the Hell’s she doing here? I thought she lived in Oshiage.”  
“ _I_ thought,” Youji said quietly, “she’d been taking Charme.”  
And what was... wait, Charme’d been the name of that drug. (Oi, Youji, why am I supposed to have all these names straight?) Now that he thought about it Ken guessed he’d been assuming that too, what with her being a girl and ill and two and two equaling four. Only trouble with that: it was all just a bit too neat. He frowned again, this time simply in thought. “Maybe she got better?”  
“You don’t get better from things like that, Ken.”  
“Then she can’t have been taking it,” Ken said, dabbing at his cut hand with a torn delivery receipt he had found in his pocket – dammit, really should start carrying tissues or something – then wondered why Youji was looking at him like that. “What?”  
“You know,” Youji said, “maybe you’re smarter than you look...”  
“Maybe we could ask her. She’s headed this way.”  
And Youji laughed, shaking his head as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “No, forget I spoke. You’re not.”  
“What the Hell’s that supposed to mean?”  
“Ken,” Youji said, pushing a stray curl back behind one ear, a gesture as practiced as it was entirely pointless, “a bit of friendly advice. Never, _ever_ ask a woman if she’s been dieting. If she brings it up she’s after a compliment and that’s your cue to tell her she looks great, but if she doesn’t, _don’t mention it_.”  
Well, he supposed that sounded sensible enough. Girls did get weird about stuff like that. “Okay,” Ken said. “Why not?”  
“Because,” Youji said with a grin, “you want to lose your virginity sometime before you’re forty.”

What. For a moment Ken simply stared at Youji, unable to quite believe he’d heard him right. _What the_ —he did not just say that, did he? And in the shop of all places oh Christ what if someone had heardhim. Ground, swallow me up and Mary mother of God _please_ tell me I’m not blushing...

“Oh, shut up, Youji! 

It’s time I saw to that cut.

____

Why was it that, given the choice between watching a brace of pretty girls and watching Ken, his injured hand cradled to his chest, hurry into the stockroom as if he’d just realized something was on fire out there, Youji had chosen to watch Ken? Go figure that. Youji couldn’t, but it wasn’t until the door banged shut behind Ken that he turned back to the road.

If he had been feeling uncharitable, Youji would have said Ken just didn’t want to deal with the girls. (Or him. It could always have been him Ken didn’t want to deal with.) The boy had been right; they were headed this way. The tall one, the girl with the auburn hair, seemed to have won the argument: as he watched she darted across the crosswalk, her head turning this way and that at the waiting traffic as she ran. Her friend hung back for a moment then, walking slowly, she followed, breaking into a nervous trot as the green man started to flash.

An odd pair, these two – the tall girl moving like she was being chased, walking with quick, anxious strides, her long auburn hair falling across her cheeks as she glanced about herself as if she were searching for invisible enemies; her friend, a battered satchel slung over one shoulder and her arms full of books, walking slowly, head bowed.

“Where’s Ken?”

Aya. Wait, what the Hell? Youji’s head snapped up, he glanced back at the redhead over one shoulder, half-expecting to see him reappearing in the middle of a puff of smoke. When had _he_ come back?

“You,” he said definitely, “need to learn to make more noise.”  
Aya ignored that, but then of course he did. “Where is Ken?”  
“Out back,” Youji said: simplest way to shut Aya up was to give him what he wanted. “Did something stupid and hurt himself but what else is new. I’d finish it up for him—” Or not, but who cared, “—but you know what Ken’s like, he’d only say I’d done it all wrong and start over…”  
“Hello?”

 And Aya hadn’t cared about any of that, but that didn’t matter because Youji decided that he really didn’t care what Aya thought right now anyway.

 It was the same girl all right, the girl called Moth. Still tall, still auburn, she still spoke in the same quick, anxious half-whisper, but the rest of the pattern was all wrong and it took Youji a moment to work out why. The same girl, no doubt about it, and yet… Moth looked _well_ , that was all, she looked ordinary. Ken wouldn’t have given her a second glance. She was clean and neatly-dressed, her hair brushed and braided at the front; if she’d pulled her hair back and herself together, maybe he wouldn’t even have recognized her…

 Her friend was all nerves too, but in a different way. Where Moth was expectant she shrank into herself, an armful of dry-looking library books clasped tight to her chest and her gaze lowered. Bobbed black hair, sensible blouse buttoned almost to the neck, glasses: she flinched when she felt his eyes upon her, quickly turning away to study a display case. All right, I get it. You’re a type, and you’re not here.

 So he turned back to Moth, gave her a wide, winning smile. “Oh, hey! I almost didn’t recognize you when you walked in. You’re looking good.”  
“Thank you.” The girl giggled awkwardly, a slight blush coming to her cheeks. “I… um, I hope I’m not disturbing…”  
“No, no. A pretty girl like you’s always a welcome sight. Don’t you think, Aya?”

Aya. It had been a tease, really. A not-entirely-harmless attempt to get a rise out the guy. Youji hadn’t expected to see Moth’s eyes slip shyly sideward, alighting on Aya’s grave profile for as long as she dared before quickly looking back up at him, the flush on her cheeks only deepening. How, Youji thought sourly, the Hell do you do it, wonderful? And it’s certainly not your personality, because as far as I can tell you haven’t got one.

“Oh,” she said, “is that really his name? It’s…”  
“It’s a long story,” Youji said, raking his curls back out of his face again. “Long story short, that’s what he wants us to call him. We’re running with it.”  
“But that’s a girl’s name,” Moth said, persistent as a child: Youji raised one eyebrow, felt himself start to frown. “Why’d he want to—”  
“Moth!” The dark girl, her voice almost pained, broke her silence. “He means it’s private.”  
Moth paled, her hands flying to her mouth. “Oh! I… I’m sorry. I didn’t realize…”

No, Youji thought. No, obviously you didn’t realize or you’d never have tried to ask about it in the first place. What the Hell, he wondered, was wrong with this woman? Sure she looked ordinary now, but looking ordinary was about where it ended. Christ, even Ken – _Ken_ , the kid who’d think nothing of walking up to a pretty girl and asking if she was trying to lose weight because you could say that to a man and he wouldn’t mind much, right? – knew better than that.

“It’s fine,” he said; he smiled, easy as anything. “You weren’t to know. How’ve you been, anyway?”  
If all else fails, change the subject. Moth smiled at him, gratefully. “Oh, I’m much better now, thank you. I’m living with Shizue—“ the dark girl shot her a frantic look: Moth, why are you telling him my _name_? “—just until I find my feet. She’s been helping me look for a job.”  
A job? “Well,” Youji said, “I’m afraid we can’t help you there and that’s a damn shame. I’d suggest we fired Ken, you’re far nicer to look at than he is, but he’s the only one does any work around here so that’s probably a no-go.”  
Moth flushed scarlet. “I didn’t mean that, Youji-san!”

But she was looking at Aya again as she spoke, and a wistful look crept into her wide-set green eyes. Of course that hadn’t been what she was asking, but wouldn’t it have been wonderful if…

The stockroom door creaked open, then clicked closed as Ken slipped back out into the shop, giving the girl a brief, incurious glance; he didn’t look at Youji at all but, once again, Youji realized that he was watching him. Thinking, you know, kid, maybe you’re not so bad after all.

Sure she was lovely to look at, but a girl like Moth could get old fast.

____

If you could tell nothing else about an executive from their offices, you could at least tell what they wanted you to think of them. That, Doctor Nishida supposed, would have to do.

 A cab ride, a smiling receptionist in a neat little uniform, an elevator and another girl stood by the controls, a girl so like the first one they could have been cast from the same mold. Going up, twenty-second floor: a slim, elegant-looking secretary sitting in a bright outer office playing at typing a letter looked up as she walked in, giving her a bright, artificial smile. Oh, yes, you’re expected. I’ll show you in…

“Doctor Nishida, President Yamanouchi.”  
“Ah, Doctor. At last. Have a seat.”

The office she had been shown into was a showpiece, a visual representation of power. There was a large, low coffee table, on top of which sat an artfully-arranged stack of books and glossy magazines which nobody ever picked up and read, and a gleaming silver coffee service out of which nobody had ever poured a cup of coffee. There were long lines of shelves groaning with more unread books; there was an oversized teak desk with a thick blotter and antique lamp, in the middle of which perched a laptop computer so slim and so sleek it looked like a toy. Nobody who worked in a place like this could possibly have been expected to do anything more than be seen to be there.

The only false note was the vase of bright red flowers stood on the coffee table. In a room as ruthlessly overdesigned as this, you expected a single lily in a tall vase, or an orchid, or a tiny bonsai tree. The carnations looked strange there, trashy and determinedly down-market – and yet somehow they were the only redeemable thing about the place.

Certainly she couldn’t say as much for the office’s owner. Yamanouchi had no right to this place – but if it hadn’t been for Yamanouchi she wouldn’t have been here at all, in more senses of the word than she liked to think of.

She sat, smoothing down her skirt; she reminded herself to look grateful. That much would be expected.

Nishida couldn’t say she cared much for the President’s taste in guests either. Sat before the desk, almost slouching in a low leather chair, was the lean, sallow figure of Professor Alexander Gersten. Her new boss. Of course she should have expected him to be there – why on Earth wouldn’t Yamanouchi have wanted to see them both? – but she couldn’t deny that an afternoon away from the pompous idiot would have been a relief.

“Thank you, President Yamanouchi. It’s a pleasure to be here.”  
Yamanouchi’s lips quirked upward into an entirely meaningless smile. “And how are you settling in?”  
“Very well.” Nishida said: she snuck a quick glance at Gersten out of the corner of one eye. He wasn’t even bothering to conceal his disdain. He didn’t like her; didn’t want her help, either, and would never have accepted it if Yamanouchi hadn’t presented him with a _fait accompli_. Here she is, Professor, like it or not. I recommend you learn to like it. The old fool! As if she would have chosen _him_ , given her head.  “The Professor has been very kind to me.”  
“I’m sure he has,” Yamanouchi said with a smile, reaching for a cigarette case on the desk. “And I hope, Doctor, that you will find the atmosphere we’re offering you here far more to your taste than the ghastly setting Andou was keeping you in. Professor Gersten—” This with a nod in Gersten’s direction, a nod and a knife-edge of a smile “—will see to it that you have everything you need, of course…”  
Gersten stirred in his chair, coming alive at the President’s words. “I hope, President Yamanouchi,” he said forcefully, “that you are not implying I would fail in my responsibilities to… to Doctor Nishida? Whatever my feelings about her appointment…”  
“Water under the bridge, I trust,” Yamanouchi said smoothly, lighting the cigarette: the sharp _click_ of the lighter served to underscore the words. “You are, of course, both professionals.”  
“Naturally,” Gersten said, voice tight. “And you may rest assured, President, that the Doctor will have all the support she requires.”

Support: Nishida bristled, eyes narrowing as she shot Gersten a sharp, withering glare. Oh, you arrogant, puffed-up little— The _gall_ of the man, to sit there in front of the President and infer that she would need her hand held! How dare he? How dare this… this foreigner denigrate her like that when it was he who needed her?

Yamanouchi simply nodded. “I’m very glad to hear it. So, if that is everything…”

“Excuse me, President Yamanouchi.” Nishida cleared her throat, recrossing her legs, “ and forgive me for interrupting, but it isn’t _quite_ everything. There is one more thing that… troubles me.”  
And was gratified to see Gersten blanch. “President Yamanouchi, I must protest. The Doctor said nothing—”  
“You needn’t worry, Professor Gersten,” Nishida said, giving the man a tight little smile. “It has nothing to do with you or your staff. I… well, to be entirely honest with you I wasn’t planning on bringing it up like this, but I suppose it is a matter that concerns us all…”  
“Doctor Nishida,” Gersten said, “I must ask you to come to the point. The President’s time is precious.”

 _Snap_. Yamanouchi shut the cigarette box, one hand resting on the lid for a moment, gazing straight at Gersten. Thank you, Professor, but you do not need to speak for me: one way or another, Gersten got the message. He slumped into his chair, arms folded, subsisting back into aggravated silence as Yamanouchi smiled again, tight and aggressive and predatory.

“Please continue, Doctor.”  
“Thank you, President Yamanouchi. What I was meaning to say…” She hesitated. Drew a deep breath. There were fine red lines scoring her ankle; there were purpling bruises, when she looked down, on one hand where the gun had been whipped from between her fingers. “The assassins, President.”  
How silly the word sounded, silly and overdramatic as something from a film. Gersten started, leaning forward in his chair. “Assassins?”  
Yes, Professor. Assassins. “Those men…” Nishida broke off, swallowed hard, caught off-guard by her own anger, and by something in her voice that was very close to fear. “Well, why should I presume that I’m – that _any_ of us are safe here? They killed my assistant! I presume that you mean to do something about protecting us?”  
“Calm down, please, Doctor.” The President raised one hand. “The matter is in hand.”  
“ _Assassins_?” Gersten said again, disbelievingly: Nishida very nearly laughed in his face. The sudden fear in his voice, the concern in his face... none of that was for her. It was all for Professor Alexander Gersten, for his own precious hide. How transparent he was. “Surely not, Doctor!”  
Yamanouchi only nodded, face grave. “I’m afraid the Doctor is correct. Andou’s team was the target of assassins, and as the sole survivor it’s possible she may be targeted again. Consequently, I have decided to arrange for additional protection.”  
“Protection?” Gersten echoed. “But Nakayama and Winters—”  
“—are my bodyguards,” Yamanouchi said firmly, “and Segawa is just a girl. I agree with the Doctor, Professor Gersten. What we require are professionals – the kind of man who is used to facing down these kinds of threats. We may have been lucky up until now, but the game has changed and we can no longer presume to be operating under clear skies. Unless, that is…” The President hesitated, eyes narrowing at Gersten through a column of smoke, “… you would prefer to gamble. Are you a gambling man, Gersten?”  
Gersten scowled. “I am a scientist.”  
Yamanouchi just nodded, drawing on the cigarette. “Then I’m sure you can see the logic.”

Reluctantly the professor nodded, tight-lipped; he might have said something more, but was cut off by the short, sharp _buzz_ of an intercom. Leaning forward, Yamanouchi pressed a small button set into the desk, listened and nodded briskly – President Yamanouchi, Mr. Morioka from TPCS. Shall I tell him to take a seat?

“Tell him I’ll be right with him, Hikaru.” Yamanouchi said. “The Professor was just leaving.”

Yamanouchi released the button, straightened and stood, giving the room a bright and meaningless smile that went everywhere and nowhere, and had nothing to do with either of them. Nishida stood too, and bowed deeply: you really, she was thinking, shouldn’t be here. There were no two ways around it, Yamanouchi was just too young. Too damn young and too damn inexperienced, and – for all the determination that it had taken to get this far at all – too impatient by half. Nobody like this had any right to be leading a company, still less a company in crisis.

The old man would have handled it differently. Handled it better—

But if the old man had still been alive, there would have been no crisis at all.  
  
  
_-to be continued-_


	6. Vorzeichen: Negative image

Tokyo. Always Tokyo. Concrete, cars, crowds. Business-suited nonentities convincing themselves that the Itoi account was really worth working themselves to exhaustion over and stupid little girls in stupid little sailor suits, chattering to one another in their stupid high-pitched voices. Idiots, all of them. They weren't even worth the trouble of messing with.

If Schuldig could have chosen a place to exile himself, it would not have been Tokyo. On his list of desirable places to vegetate, Tokyo ranked only slightly higher than Kosovo and Kinshasa. The nights were as bright as midday in June; the language was so complicated even the natives couldn't speak it right; you couldn't drive anywhere in less time than it'd take to build the car, sell it for scrap, then walk it; there wasn't a single decent sausage in the entire wretched country – and yet here he was slumped on a stripy secondhand couch somewhere in Edogawa, wherever the Hell _that_ was apart from nowhere he would ever have wanted to be, waiting for the past to catch up with him.

Whatever Rosenkreuz were going to do to them it could hardly, Schuldig thought, have been worse than Edogawa. At least they'd have the grace to do it in German…

That had been the theory, anyway.

"Problem, Crawford?"

The house was Japanese, which was to say it was a matchbox. When Crawford, sat straight-backed at the table, raised his head from the letter he had been reading and sat back in his chair, of course Schuldig noticed it. He could hardly help but notice it when the American had damn near collided with the couch in the process – but that wasn't what was remarkable about it.

There was a frown tugging at Crawford's brows; his lips were slightly pursed. Disconcerted – and that, from a man who could watch a bomb go off across the street with nothing more than an amused smirk, was disconcerting in itself. Crawford was a chessmaster who played games with Chance and Fate; he knew all the rules and was never anything less than three moves ahead, and was not above judiciously cheating if it helped him keep his lead. A man like that had no right to be caught off-guard.

"I wouldn't go that far," Crawford said in exasperatingly accentless German. "Let's say there's been a development."  
At least he didn't sound surprised: Schuldig had to give the cold-blooded bastard that. "Didn't see it coming, huh?"  
"We've gone into this, Schuldig," Crawford said, tossing the letter to the table. "And stop that, it's irritating."

Schuldig sighed, muttering a curse. Christ, if he could get his hands on the asshole taught Crawford to shield… and there was no point thinking it because even supposing he could have done he'd have turned the man into origami years ago and that still wouldn't have solved the problem. The barrier he could have lived with; the bit where Crawford always, always knew when he was testing it? That had been just plain cruel.

"Irritating," Schuldig said vaguely. "You know, Crawford, I'd be careful how I used that word. If I were you, that is. So, level with me – this whole Edogawa thing. Slight waste of time, or gigantic waste of time?"  
"Excuse me?"  
Schuldig frowned. Damn, but that prim little East Coast _excuse me_ sounded stupid in German. "Just tell me if this is the kind of development where you stop to pack. If I'm gonna be running I at least want the right shoes."  
"It's a proposition, Schuldig," Crawford said coolly. "Your choice in footwear is irrelevant."  
"Proposition? What kind of a proposition?"  
"A business proposition. A man called Shun Yamanouchi is in the market for bodyguards."

 _Bodyguards_? Didn't we just leave this party?

Turning in his seat, one arm flat against the back of the couch, Schuldig gave his companion an incredulous stare. It couldn't be a wind-up, Crawford was a humorless bastard and he didn't make jokes, but what else could this be? Christ, it wasn't as if they'd wanted theTakatori assignment in the first place – they were Schwarz, not some pack of rent-a-thugs who'd be anyone's for the right price – and now here came the new boss, same as the old boss, thinking nothing of asking them to go back to playing nursemaid to some bland middle-aged Jap in an expensive suit, and not even a useful idiot this time round…

"How the Hell did he even get a hold of us?"  
Crawford gave him a knife-edge of a smile. "I believe we have the late lamented Reiji Takatori to thank. Our would-be client is attracted by the _cachet_ of employing the former Prime Minister's staff."  
"Hah!" Schuldig shook his head. "So now he's fucking us over from beyond the grave?"  
"Ironic, really," Crawford said mildly, "when one remembers how he got there…"  
Schuldig laughed. Maybe they should tell this Yamanouchi guy about _that_ small detail. See if he was still so keen on them watching his back after that! "So," he said, "what are we going to do about it?"  
"Do?" Crawford echoed. "Schuldig, we are going to do nothing. Our services—" He reached for the letter again, tore it clear in two, "—are not for sale."  
____

Shinobu sees with his eyes closed.

He had curled up in an armchair in the corner of the office, chin resting on his folded forearms, knees drawn up to his chest. He is pale as a plant left to bloom in a cupboard; he is thirteen years old; he might have been asleep. And yet he could feel them, the people in the office – he saw with his eyes closed, things came so much clearer that way.

The president, for instance, was angry. Rage, hard-repressed beneath a veneer of practiced calm: rage burning bright as flame, but buried where nobody could find it but him. Hikaru Kameda was troubled, slender body taut and alive with strain; Kameda knew the President, and could guess. Nakayama practiced calm, Winters merely bored, and if he wasn't yawning it was only because he was old enough and disciplined enough to know not to show it. And yet, if Shinobu were to open his eyes, there would be nothing to see but a roomful of people in suits, all practiced smiles and feigned attentiveness, neat and composed as figures in a photograph…

It wasn't all he could see. He saw the scientists in the complex: their feelings thrummed at the back of his mind, a tapestry of focused tedium jeweled with sudden brilliant sparks of excitement and frustration. Beneath that—

He could see them. He could always see them.

"I said they would not go for it," Winters said.

Winters's voice was perfectly level, but Shinobu could feel his satisfaction. There was something sick about it, a nasty, gloating edge that stained and tainted everything it touched. He always had been an insolent man… The soft sound of falling paper, fluttering and skidding across a tabletop: a sudden bolt of fury cut through Hikaru Kameda's anxious fluttering; the president's rage burned white-hot, and all Winters might have seen was a single raised brow.

Shinobu opened his eyes. There was Winters, stood over the President's desk, the papers he had just tossed down scattered across the blotter; there was the President, hands folded on the desktop, gazing levelly at the man.

"We remember," Shinobu said quietly. "You don't have to brag, Winters."  
Winters started, turning to him in sudden surprise; when he spoke, it was to Yamanouchi. "For God's sake," he said, "Could you please tell the child not to do such a thing?"  
Yamanouchi merely smiled, that burning rage lost beneath a sudden flood of satisfaction. "Whyever would I? You seem to forget, Mister Winters. That's why I keep him around."  
"Well I wish to God you did not. Can you not tell him he is not to spy on us, at least?"  
Shinobu frowned. He raised his head from his arms. "It's not spying," he said resentfully. "You might as well ask me not to look at you."  
"Leave the boy alone, please," Yamanouchi said. "Shinobu is not important. You are all to forget that he is here. What we came here to discuss is this."

This: the letter. The letter they themselves had sent, no more than three days previous: it now lay on Yamanouchi's blotter, torn clear down the middle. The president picked one of the torn halves up careful as a scientist examining a specimen and held it up to the light, a frown tugging at the corner of the lips: the anger still burned but it had tempered itself, sheer curiosity quenching the flames.

"I must say," Yamanouchi said, turning the letter between finger and thumb, "that this was not quite as… eloquent a response as I was expecting, though in its own way I suppose it speaks volumes. There was no other note?"  
Nakayama shook his head slightly. "No, President Yamanouchi. I would imagine this _Mister_ Crawford," his lips twisted scornfully as he spoke; the Western title sounded quite ridiculous, exactly as Nakayama had hoped it would, "felt that nothing else was needed." And he sighed, and the sigh said _foreigners_ clear as a shout.  
"Then we must raise our game, gentlemen. Every man has a price and this Mister Crawford is no exception. I intend—" Yamanouchi dropped the letter, "—to discover his."

If only Shinobu had known why it mattered so much. Surely there were hundreds of men in the city Yamanouchi could have hired – thousands even. Why was Yamanouchi so set on this group? He could feel the President's certainty, the determination that Crawford and his men were the only ones who would do; the thing he could never understand was _why_ …

And Nakayama frowned. The President might merely have thought him confused, but Shinobu felt the man's unease plain as if it had been his own.

"Is it wise," Nakayama said finally, "to hire a bodyguard you can't trust?"  
Yamanouchi chuckled. "Trust? Nakayama-san, the loyalty of such men is a commodity. You know that. Our own Mister Winters is living proof of it. Crawford is no different to any of them. If he's holding out for anything, it's for a better offer. All we have to do is make him one."  
"Forgive me, President Yamanouchi," Nakayama said quietly. "But it seems to me these men don't wish to work with us. As you said, their response is quite clear on that point. But no doubt they have their reasons, and speaking entirely professionally my inclination is to respect them. I have no doubt we can buy these men. But if you were to ask me, _should we_ – my answer would have to be no."  
"Thank you for your opinion, Nakayama-san." Yamanouchi said coolly. "Nevertheless, I intend to have these men. I have heard rumors… this group possess certain talents, or so I've been told. If this is true and these men – I believe they call themselves Schwarz; I rather like that – if they truly are all they've been said to be, their assistance would prove invaluable. Nakayama-san, you and Mister Winters are to re-establish contact with this man Crawford. Tell him…" Yamanouchi sat back comfortably, hands behind the head, smiling at the ceiling, "… tell him we are prepared to negotiate, and that it would be wisest for him to do the same. Life can, after all, be made very uncomfortable for a foreigner in Japan. Isn't that correct, Mister Winters?"

Winters bridled, but said nothing; he bowed when Nakayama did, stiffly and far too shallowly, and he was muttering to himself in English as Kameda showed them to the door. Shinobu watched them go incuriously. Sometimes, all his own gifts were good for was confirming what any fool with eyes already knew.

"Shinobu," The President with a smile, "tell me how the gentlemen were feeling."  
"Of course, President Yamanouchi."

Sometimes, Shinobu wondered how long it had been since he last knew how he felt – but that, of course, wasn't what he was there for.  
____

Monday lunchtime and the library: some day, Omi told himself, I'm just going to stop bothering bringing a lunch. All they did was sit in his bag until he got home, where he'd stick his bento in the fridge and tell himself he'd eat it later, then forget about it. Goodness knew what happened to them after that. He supposed Ken ate them. Ken ate pretty much anything if it was left unattended long enough.

If he'd told Ken he'd been working on the Nishida thing instead of eating his lunch, he knew his friend would mother him a bit then ask expectantly if he'd found anything – still believing that he would, that the answer really was there for the taking and of course Omi would know exactly where to find it. And here he was staring at his laptop reading about Charme for the thousandth time for the lack of any other leads… honestly, Omi wished he had Ken's faith in his own abilities. It must have been nice, he thought a little resentfully, to trust that Omi would handle it.

Sometimes, Omi caught himself wondering if the only reason for Ken's ever-present optimism was that he didn't really have any idea what he was talking about…

He felt guilty for so much as considering it. Omi told himself that was an unkind thing to think, and unfair too – yet that couldn't change the fact that, when he got home, Ken would still be the only one present who still thought they'd find Nishida eventually. Something'll come up, you just gotta give these things time…

Youji clearly didn't believe a word of it. Youji clearly wasn't about to take a soccer player's advice on how to conduct an investigation. After one too many days chasing down one too many blind alleys, he had come home late with his hair damp, smelling of cigarette smoke and floral shampoo, and had hung a detour into the cellar to declare the whole thing a waste of time. Call me when you find something, kiddo, but until then I'm out. Aya had lasted a little longer, but Omi knew the redhead well enough by now to know when he had lost interest in an assignment. The Andou mission was, after all, officially complete…

Maybe the others could accept that. He couldn't.

(Bless you, Ken, for at least trying to stick with it.)

Sighing, Omi sat back in his chair, rubbing at one eye with the heel of his hand, hoping against hope it might convince his incipient headache to leave him alone. Charmewasn't looking like a real word any more, not even a foreign one, and it wasn't like old lab reports would tell him where Nishida was hiding. There had to be some other place to look, some stone he hadn't turned over twenty times already…

"Omi-kun? What's that you're working on?"  
"Oh, uh… it's nothing, Minako-san! Just something for class."  
"Wow, do you think we'll all need to know that stuff? It looks… _really super hard_."  
"Uh… well, I just wanted to check it, that's all."  
"Really? That's cool, if I was gonna know all the things you do I'd have to live to be a hundred."  
"I'm sure that's not true, Minako-san. I'm sure there's lots of things you know that I don't."

Minako gave him a smile, and headed over to the library counter with her arms full of books. Quickly, Omi closed the lab report, not without a strange swelling of relief; he sat back heavily in his chair and sighed. That, he thought, was way too close. He could only thank his stars Minako hadn't really known what she was looking at.

There had to be something safer to be seen doing, didn't there? Something still-useful he could – well, not exactly _lie_ about but sort of invent an interest in, if someone asked. Even knowing that his classmates thought he was some kind of super-genius, lab reports were just too hard to explain away. Who looked at them for fun? But maybe if he checked up on something else… Well, why not? It wasn't like he had been getting anywhere before, either. The only question now was what on Earth was there he could look at in a school library they hadn't checked twenty times already?

On a whim, he loaded an internet browser. On a whim, he typed in _Tellus Pharmaceuticals_ , and hit search.

Net gain: one company website. It looked… well, it looked like every other company website he had ever visited, but at least if anyone looked over his shoulder he could say he was thinking about studying biochemistry. Chin propped in hand, Omi idly flipped through the pages – vision statement, about our products, press office, something about R&D and the usual link for hopeful job seekers revealing nothing more than that Tellus were currently in the market for a receptionist, two security guards and an assistant something-or-other in sales. In other words, there was nothing.

He flipped back to the homepage and from there to a page headed _What's New At Tellus?_ , wondering as he did so how they were planning on presenting the whole Charme mess: of course the answer was that they weren't.

The most recent newsletter – Omi scanned it anyway, more because it was there than because he thought it would have anything much to tell him – was already some seven months old. Headed by a black-bordered picture of a dour-looking man in late middle age, it contained a lengthy obituary of the company president, who had passed away in December after a short illness. A second article tucked discreetly beneath the first talked about the accomplishments of his multitalented son Shun, a high-flying thirtysomething with an MBA from Harvard who had served as marketing director since arriving home and was now, for all his youth and inexperience, President in his father's place. An embarrassed whisper of a still-smaller article wished two former Board members all the best in their new careers.

Either it was another piece of the same puzzle or it had gotten into the box by accident. Omi wished he knew which was more likely; he wished there was someone else he could ask about it…

Ken was going to have to do.

Back at the shop Youji, all his attention on a sweet-faced grad student who'd worked herself into a charming flap over a birthday bouquet for her mother, hadn't even bothered feigning interest in the – could he even call it a development? Omi wasn't sure that didn't overstate things somewhat – the news about Yamanouchi senior's death. Aya, propping up the wall, was too busy glowering (whether over Youji's very particular take on good salesmanship, the dreamy gaze the girl they called Moth was directing at him over a display stand laden with Hello Kitty bouquets, or something rather more internal Omi hardly liked to ask) to do much more than raise a single eyebrow. It might have been vexing, but it was hardly a surprise.

Ken all but threw down his plant mister and demanded Omi show him everything. That wasn't a surprise either.

"I don't get it."

Ten minutes later and Ken was leaning heavily on the back of Omi's chair as they both looked at the same company website, the same photograph of the same grim-faced old man with its heavy border of black. Tellus Pharmaceuticals regrets to announce the death of Company President Kenshirou Yamanouchi, 60, of Nagata-cho, Chiyoda Ward, who passed away peacefully on December 12, 1997…

Ken was frowning. "What's this all about, Omi?"  
"Well… I'm not sure," Omi admitted. "All this really says is that the company's under new management, right? It might not mean anything."  
"But if you figured it was nothing then you wouldn't have brought it up, right?"  
Omi smiled at the computer screen. Honestly, Ken knew him far too well. "I just don't much like the timing," he said. "I mean... I can't think of any way it would benefit a company like this one to get involved with a man like Andou or this Verwandlung group, whoever they might be. I checked the share prices and their stock's in freefall over this Charme mess, but the evidence…"  
"Evidence?" Ken blinked. Please, the look in his eyes said, stop talking about the stock market. "Evidence of what? All we've got on these guys is a bunch of… of stuff happening that sorta _might_ have something to do with them but just as easily might not. That don't add up to much more than a hunch."  
Omi nodded, admitting the logic. "I guess so," he said: he turned in his chair, he met Ken's eyes. What are you thinking, Ken-kun? "But sometimes the best thing to do with a hunch is to play it, right? And circumstantially—"

Circumstantially, Tellus is everywhere in this.

"Well, look at it this way, Ken-kun. Firstly," Omi said, counting off the points on his fingers, "There's the old laboratory. It's Tellus property, they just don't have any need for another facility like that. Maybe it's not just coincidence Andou set up there. Could be someone from Tellus was letting him use it. Secondly, if Tellus knew he was there they must have known Charme would hurt people. Why stake their reputation on a drug they knew was dangerous? If they knew what was going on there must have been something in it for them. They must have known it would be a PR disaster. And it can't have been money, they're hemorrhaging profit right now…"  
Ken snapped his fingers. "Andou's data."  
"Exactly," Omi said, "but why do they want _that_? Thirdly, Andou had vanished. Nobody saw him for almost a year – but this Verwandlung group knew exactly where to find him, and someone at Tellus might have done. That might mean there's a connection. There might be a connection with Yamanouchi's death, too… I'd have to check to be sure, but it certainly doesn't look like there was anything suspicious about their actions before he died."  
"Wow. That's… either there's a lotta coincidence going round or these guys are up to something."  
"It really is starting to look that way, isn't it? And it doesn't really seem like this Shun Yamanouchi was a popular choice for the new President, either, not if two Directors left straight after he took the job."  
Ken looked dubious. "You think that's connected, too?"  
"Well, maybe. One man leaving could just be a coincidence, but two looks a lot like a statement, doesn't it?"

Did it? The look on Ken's face said he wasn't sure and that, Omi supposed, was hardly surprising when his friend only met businessmen when they'd been misbehaving and even then the acquaintance never lasted long. Offices, to Ken, were things that happened to other people; business was a mystery and a boring one. No wonder he was looking lost.

"What are you thinking, Ken-kun?"  
"Is it me or does none of this feel right?" Ken gave the monitor a flat, suspicious look, as if he had caught the computer conspiring to keep secrets from him. "Christ, I'm no expert on this shit but it can't _all_ be chance, can it? There's just… well, you only _get_ so many coincidences, right?"  
"I'd say so," Omi said. "Maybe I'm just seeing what I want to, but this is starting to look an awful lot like a pattern."

(Didn't mean it was though. It takes more than a string of bad luck to make a conspiracy. Shun Yamanouchi was far more likely to be inexperienced and incompetent than any kind of crook. Andou was dead, Verwandlung a cipher: never mind what had happened to Nishida, the mission was over. If there was anything more to it Kritiker would tell him, Persia would pass it down. The human mind loved patterns, loved them so much it saw them where they had never existed at all, and yet—)

Something was happening, or nothing was. Only one way to tell which, right?

"I think I'm going to look into this company a bit more," Omi said. "Tell Aya-kun I'm working down here, okay?"  
"Sure thing," Ken said, and smiled. "Let me know if you need any help."  
____

The office might have been picked out of a catalogue. All low-lying power furniture and vast expanses of carpet, vast windows, it was a status symbol and nothing more. It was another rich man's toy, visual proof for the dull-witted that its owner had made it. It was pretty but unrevealing and, ultimately, entirely uninteresting; Crawford spared it no more than a cursory glance. He was far more interested in its owner, who was—

Japanese bosses were very much of a type; Shun Yamanouchi, sat stiff and proud behind a landing-strip of a desk and flanked by two unsmiling men in identical suits, very much failed to fit it. How very curious, Crawford thought, though he knew far better than to show it. He left it to Schuldig to react for him.

"Ah, Mister Crawford. How nice to see you. Didn't I tell you, Nakayama-san? Every man has his price."

Crawford simply smiled, and bowed slightly. Every man had his reasons, too.

Nothing Yamanouchi could have offered could possibly been as compelling as Schuldig and the man next door. The man next door – some Kondo or Satou or Itou – who nonetheless managed to live very large for an assistant section chief with a young family. The man whose company was currently being audited, who had realized that the audit was taking rather too long, and who had spent the last three evenings, or so Schuldig assured him, in an enjoyable lather of indecision about whether or not he should come clean about the money he'd been embezzling or if he should empty his bank account and bolt. Better than television, Schuldig had assured Crawford with a smirk…

We're leaving, was all Crawford had said.

He had left it to Schuldig to figure out why, too.

Edogawa was a memory and a bad one at that; Yamanouchi an unlikely savior: a drowning man couldn't afford the luxury of choice. There was, after all, more than one way to hide. Lying low had brought him nothing but cultivated boredom: time to give plain sight a go. Two days out of the safehouse and here he was, stood in another oversized showpiece of an office nobody ever worked in, consenting to be bought. His game could stand the addition of a handful of new pieces.

"I take it," Yamanouchi said brightly, "you know why you've been called here?"  
"I presume you have a proposition for us," Crawford said; stood two paces behind him, Schuldig thrust his hands into his jacket pockets, rocked back on his heels, gave the ceiling a sardonic smile. "Aside from that, I'm afraid you have the advantage over me."  
Oh really? Yamanouchi raised a brow, lips quirking in what could have been amusement. "You surprise me, Mister Crawford. I would have thought a man like you would have known exactly what I wished to speak with you about. Your reputation precedes you, I'm afraid."  
"Don't play games, Yamanouchi," Schuldig said: his voice was harsh, he spoke that one bit too loud, he wasn't even trying to hide his irritation. "We're here. What do you want?"  
Yamanouchi simply laughed, and that was curious too. Maybe there was more to this spoiled child than Crawford had thought. "Well, I see Schwarz go in for plain speaking. I rather like that. I tend to distrust excessive politeness, it's so damnably dishonest." The president lit a cigarette, took a drag, pushed the box toward Crawford with the tips of the fingers. "What I want, Mister… Schuldig, wasn't it? is your assistance. I believe Schwarz have worked as bodyguards before – for the late Prime Minister, is that correct?"  
"Indeed, President Yamanouchi," Crawford said. He ignored the cigarettes. "Quite correct."

Exactly what was that supposed to mean? Yamanouchi's eyes narrowed; the cigarette touched to the lips may have hidden a frown. There was nothing there: just a simple statement and Crawford's smile, cool, flat and utterly dishonest. What you see, President Yamanouchi, is absolutely all you're going to get.

"Now, I believe your last employer—" Yamanouchi hesitated, as if listening to someone else speak, then laughed. "Oh, this is ridiculous. To Hell with it, let's dispense with euphemism. You know exactly why Takatori hired you; I've heard the rumors and personally I happen to believe them. You – Schwarz – you are psychics."  
It wasn't a question. Crawford inclined his head slightly. "We prefer _talented_ , but yes."  
"Very well." Yamanouchi smiled. It wasn't a businessman's smile. "Mister Crawford, I will be frank. I do not need bodyguards. I have bodyguards. What I need from you is your _talents_. That being the case," the President said, narrow eyes narrowing further, "I don't think it too much to expect an explanation of how they work – or an assurance that you will not use them against me, or any of my agents."

Schuldig snorted, gave the ceiling a satiric smile – yeah, you can expect that all you like! – then he raised his eyebrows in sudden surprise, shooting Crawford a dubious glance as the American let a thought slip past his shields. Crawford, what the Hell—

"Of course," Crawford said smoothly. "I totally understand. President Yamanouchi, I am a precognitive. My colleague here is a telepath. The rest of our unit are somewhat more useful."  
"I see. I believe we can work with that, don't you think, Nakayama-san?" Yamanouchi turned to one of the mutes by the desk; the man nodded once. It might have been simply acknowledgement. "I am, however, somewhat concerned… let me put it like this. While I can certainly see the value of a telepath, I would not keep a guard dog if I feared its bite. Why should I trust that your colleague—" the president's narrow eyes narrowed further as they flickered across Schuldig's face, "—is not reading _my_ mind, too?"  
"That won't be a problem. I believe you may be what my colleague calls a void."  
"A void?"  
"The precise phrase would be _eine Leere_ but that would be the closest translation, yes."

The strangest thing about it was it had never come up before. Yamanouchi was watching him, not Schuldig: fortunate, when sometimes even Schuldig would give himself away. The redhead's eyes narrowed slightly; he shot a glance at Crawford, and he frowned. Crawford – and though Crawford was no mind-reader, here and now he never would have needed to be – what do you think you're playing at?

He could feel Schuldig testing his shields again, and Crawford dropped them for a moment, thinking very clearly and deliberately of nothing but the game: I'm protecting our interests, you fool. The least you can do is play along.

"Explain," Yamanouchi said.  
And Crawford smiled, and told the President lies. "It's quite simple, really. A _void_ is what we call a telepathic dead spot: a mind that, for whatever reason, is off-limits. Effectively, such people – such as yourself, President Yamanouchi – are naturally immune from my colleague's powers. It's rare, but not that rare… I'd estimate between five and eight percent of the population are voids. You're not the first one we've met, but I can't say we've been employed by one before."  
"Well, there's a first time for everything. Thank you, Mister Crawford. Now… Schuldig." The president gave him a sharp look. "I trust this isn't something you'll find problematic?"  
Schuldig merely shrugged. "I don't need to know what you think."  
"Very well, then. I believe, gentlemen, that we have a deal."

The president stood, stepped out from behind the oversized desk, holding out one hand; they shook. The president's grip was powerful, the handshake firm and unflinching – no, this Yamanouchi didn't fit the mold at all. Negotiations over, Yamanouchi led the way over to a cluster of low-slung chairs, gesturing to Crawford that he should sit; an elegant secretary, discreetly summoned from the outside office, offered surprisingly tolerable coffee and disappointing little biscuits that tasted like sugary cardboard, which Schuldig ate anyway and then asked for more.

"Now," Yamanouchi said after an eternity of small-talk had been dispensed with, "As to precisely _why_ your services are required…"  
"I would imagine," Crawford said with a perfectly straight face, "that you have a problem only we can fix."  
Yamanouchi simply nodded. "Unfortunately, it seems that may be the case. My organization, Mister Crawford, has been targeted by assassins. One of my men was murdered in his own office. Another's life was threatened… Doctor Yaeko Nishida. The doctor is one of my most valuable assets, and I intend to ensure her security. That—" Yamanouchi set down the coffee cup and sat back, hands folded, "—would be where you come in. Am I correct in assuming you've had dealings with these kinds of groups before?"  
"Of course," Crawford said. "Powerful men often acquire equally powerful enemies…"  
He got no further. "With one group, Mister Crawford, in particular?"

Schuldig, slumped in his chair with his head tipped back and a cigarette burning disregarded between his lips, sat up and looked over at Crawford, a question in his eyes. Crawford nodded slightly: now this he had seen coming. Yes, Schuldig, that _is_ why we're here. A part of it, anyway. The president simply watched, hands folded, and waited. It must have been as good an answer as any.

"We have names," Yamanouchi said into the silence. "Nakayama-san?"  
The dark bodyguard stepped forward; he cleared his throat. "I saw them," he said. "At least the ones who came after the Doctor. There were probably others. Names were Ken and Yuji, or maybe it was Youji. Something like that. Yuji's a tall guy. Early twenties. Sunglasses, dyed blond hair. The other one's just a kid, eighteen or nineteen or so—"  
"Weiss," Schuldig said. "We've met." And he grinned sudden and savage and predatory, showing his eye-teeth.  
The President smiled. "So you'd welcome a reunion, then." It was no question at all. "That can be arranged."  
____

Twenty minutes till close. Leaning on the end of a broom, Ken gazed out of the rain-washed window at the crowded streets, at the commuters huddled beneath their umbrellas, their jackets pulled tight about themselves. Christ, going through all that just to get home… At least all he'd have to do once they'd closed up was walk upstairs.

He was starting to wonder if Moth ever went home. There she was again, hanging round a display of pot plants dressed in a waitress's plain white blouse and black skirt, and this was the third time this week, wasn't it? If he lived in Oshiage he sure as Hell wouldn't waste his evening hanging round in Jinnan every time he got off work, he'd go back and take a bath and try to forget tomorrow like a normal human being, but then if he lived in Oshiage he wouldn't have gone to Kamiyama-cho every day to pour coffee and clear tables. It wasn't like there was nowhere in all Katsushika selling cheap lunches to office workers, was there? The woman had to be daft.

It took Youji to work out why she was doing it, but then to him it had never even been a question.

"She can't need that many pot plants," Ken said as Moth reached for a pot of white cyclamen.  
"Of course she doesn't," Youji said; Ken started. He'd thought Youji was still outside finishing up his cigarette, but here he was, all damp hair and expensive cologne, giving Moth a slightly ironic smile. "We don't need that many pot plants, kid. She certainly doesn't, unless she really likes the idea of living in a greenhouse…"  
"Well, what's the point then?"  
"What do you think?" Youji asked: the girl, blushing slightly, her head shyly bowed, was waiting the counter where Aya was wrapping a bouquet for a smartly-dressed young man who was visibly fidgeting. "Why do you think she hasn't asked you to ring that thing up for her?"  
Ken shrugged. "Because I'm cleaning up?"  
"Nominally, Ken, yes you are, but it's actually because you're not Aya and don't ask me how he keeps on doing it, but I suppose some women like them pretty and tedious…"  
"You sure you're not just mad she's not after you?" Ken asked, and ducked pre-emptively. "And I don't buy it anyway, she's too old for that schoolgirl crap."  
"That," Youji said airily, "is because you haven't been paying attention. You notice how long it takes her to decide what she's getting?"  
"Yes, and it's bloody annoying…"  
"Exactly," Youji said, as if the rest of it should have been obvious – then, when Ken only looked blank, he added, "Ken, at least pretend you're not completely clueless. She only ever goes up to the counter when Aya's already serving. She's not after flowers, she's after an excuse to talk to him. Keep up, kid."

Thanks for that, Youji. Bastard couldn't have been more patronizing if he'd topped all that off by ruffling his hair.

Of course he'd noticed. Ken simply hadn't imagined it meant anything, that was all. This was Aya, right? He… well, okay Ken guessed that women, or some of them, must have found him attractive enough. How else was he supposed to explain Sakura? But it wasn't like Aya ever did anything to encourage them and while that might have been enough for a schoolgirl who, when it came down to it, didn't really want the whole thing to go anywhere because it was safer that way – there _were_ girls did that too, right? – wasn't Moth old enough to want a little more?

Aya, for Christ's sake. A grown woman and she might as well have been mooning over a poster. At least a guy in a poster would have been smiling at her.

"Really?" Ken said. "Well, good luck to her's all I can say. Reckon he's even noticed she's a girl yet?"  
"Jury's still out on that one," Youji replied, absently pushing back his hair. "I don't think he ever got there with Sakura and Ken? I'm not sure you're in any position to talk. At least Aya's never run away with the idea of marrying a woman he's known for a month."  
Ken glared at him. It should have been dead and buried, but… "Never said I was going to marry her."  
"You didn't have to," Youji said mildly.

And Ken might have said something he'd gone on to regret (and damn the bit where they were in the shop, where Aya was bidding a matter-of-fact farewell to the nervous young man, where Moth stood hushed and expectant with a pot plant clasped to her chest) when the door to the cellar creaked open and Omi stepped into the shop, blinking like a man who'd not seen daylight in months. As if the last thing he'd expected was to push open his door and discover a flower shop there…

The kid recovered well, give him that. He blinked, he seemed to shake himself; he gave Moth a brilliant smile that even Ken wasn't quite sure was feigned. "Good evening, Moth-san!" he called. "You're staying late." There wasn't a hint of reproach in it. How the Hell had Omi managed that?  
"Oh, Omi-kun!" The girl seemed to start, and she colored. "I… I was at work. Café Rubin? Thought I'd call in on my way to the station… You should all stop by some day, I'll give you a great discount…" But it was Aya she wanted, Youji was right about that. She stole a glance at him, quickly lowering her eyes, and her blush deepened.  
"Don't put yourself out," Youji murmured, more to himself than to Moth.  
"We do really nice lunches," Moth said, seemingly entirely for Aya's benefit. "You must _eat_ , right? It's not far, just down the road…"  
"Of course," Aya said drily, "we eat."  
Moth blinked. Omi grinned nervously, and changed the subject. "You're buying another plant, Moth-san? You must really like flowers."  
"You'll be able to open your own shop soon." That was Youji, trying again, and this time the girl must have heard him, because she giggled.  
"Oh," she said, "I wouldn't say that…"

Ken decided he'd had enough. Let the others encourage the woman if they liked and yes, Fujimiya, that does include you, you can't even _talk_ to a girl like that without her running away with the idea you've connected. He wasn't about to play along with her dumb-ass theory that Aya was somehow boyfriend material – look where that had gotten Sakura. Anyway, someone had to fetch in that bamboo and it damn sure wasn't going to be Youji now, was it?

He hesitated by the bamboo, glanced back through the windows. There was Aya, frowning over Moth's flowers; there was Moth gazing adoringly up at him and digging in her purse for her money. Most likely she was smiling, probably kidding himself that he was too above-it-all for friendly teasing and that it didn't mean for a moment he wanted her to go away. There she was telling herself that buying flowers every day was just fine if she got to see Aya again while she was doing it. How much did they pay waitresses anyway? Ken suspected it wasn't a lot.

Just tell her you don't like her, Aya. Tell her she's wasting her time…

"Bye, Ken-kun," she said as she stepped past him and out into the rain, her little plant clasped tight to her chest. "See you tomorrow." And she waved, as if this all made them friends.  
"Yeah," Ken said, "Yeah, I guess."

Because someone's gotta stop her, and it shouldn't be up to me.

"I thought the shop would be empty," Omi was saying as Ken stepped back into the shop and wrestled the bamboo into its spot by the door. "She's been here every day this week, hasn't she?"  
"Pretty much. She missed Tuesday," Youji said. "Must have been her day off… Aya, can't you just end this farce?"  
Aya met Youji's eyes, raised a pointed brow. "Farce?"  
" _Farce_ , Aya," Youji said, sidling over to the redhead and draping an arm about his shoulders. "Yes. Come on. Take one for the team and ask her for coffee. She'll soon figure out you've got no conversation and move on, and we can all forget this ever happened."  
Aya shrugged Youji's arm off his shoulder and went to close the shutters. "This has nothing to do with me."  
"Except for the bit where she's crazy about you," Youji pointed out.

Aya shot him an irritated look – Kudou, I know where you sleep, now would you please stop talking. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said, and of course that wasn't going to be good enough. This was Youji he was talking to, and on Youji's specialist subject at that. Ken met Omi's eyes, gave the boy a small shrug.

"Look, Fujimiya," Youji was saying, and something in his tone said he was only being entirely serious, "the way I see this you've got two choices here. Moth likes you. She's cute, she's willing and she's legal and if she's a bit nuts, you're a big boy. You either like her back and make the most of this, or you don't and you let her down gently. Anything else is unfair on her."  
"Did you want something, Omi?" Aya said.

And Omi took a deep breath, and Ken thought, _oh, shit_. The look on the kid's face, the hesitation before he started to speak, the way he glanced about himself, quick and anxious, as if to make sure they were really alone – the only thing it could add up to was trouble, but the kind of trouble that normally came pre-packaged in a buff folder. Ken felt himself starting to frown. But he hadn't seen Manx in weeks – not since the Charme mission. _What the_ —

"You figure something out to tell that girl." Youji pointed a warning finger at Aya. "Or I'm gonna step in."  
Aya looked away, erasing him with the turn of his head. "Omi."  
"Well… we should probably just close early," Omi said. "Something's come up."

Trouble it was.

Ten minutes and Ken was stood in the basement, gazing with Youji and Aya over Omi's shoulder at what appeared to be someone else's email inbox. It might have seemed like more of an intrusion if only its owner had been checking it but he'd only bothered to read one message out of the last twenty, and even that Omi'd most likely done for him…

"Omi, whose email is this?"  
"Kasamatsu's," Omi said. "He was Andou's go-between."  
Oh, yeah. One of those Charme guys, the distributor, now terminally indisposed. Youji (hands in pockets, somehow managing to sprawl while standing upright) gave a chuckle, and shook his head. "Ken," he said, "when I have my mid-life crisis, do me a favor? Remind me fast cars and pretty girls still exist and I don't have to get my kicks marking time with mad scientists."  
"All right," Ken said. "Youji, fast cars and pretty girls still exist."

Most of it, of course, was nothing but junk – the usual crap that piled up in any email inbox nobody bothered checking for a few days. Mailing list notifications, online subscriptions, the usual stuff about pills and creams. Youji probably had the exact same garbage in his inbox, in between the things his girlfriends sent him and… and whatever else it was Youji usually got emails about. The outlier, though—

"Nishida?"

—well, no matter how many girls he charmed into giving him their email addresses, Youji wouldn't have anything like _that_. Even he wouldn't be getting love-letters from the one that got away.

"Nishida." Omi clicked on her message, called it up for what must have been the fourth time at least. "But… this can't be from her, can it? At the very least it's not in good faith, I don't see how she couldn't know Kasamatsu was dead…"  
"What does she say?" Aya asked.  
Nothing good, from the look on Omi's face. "Actually, Aya-kun, that's the second thing that's worrying me."

She wanted to meet up: that was what it came down to. No pleasantries, no expressions of concern: Nishida might have been a stranger who hadn't seen a Tokyo newspaper for all she seemed to care about Kasamatsu's health. She had a new employer. She had a proposition for him. And an address in Rinkai-cho, just off the Bayshore route of the Metropolitan expressway, and Tellus showing up like a bad smell – she would be there, at ten past ten on Thursday night. All Kasamatsu had to do was be there too…

"Whoever wrote that," Youji said definitely, "doesn't write like a woman."  
Ken frowned at him over one banked shoulder. "What does that even mean?"  
"So maybe she didn't write it…"  
"No," Omi said. "I think she did. Ken-kun's right, Youji-kun. This is a business message, and isn't Nishida working for someone else now? They could easily have asked her to write this."  
"Why, though?" Aya asked, though it didn't really sound like a question. Aya's questions never did. "She's clearly not interested in Kasamatsu."  
And Omi said, "No. She's interested in us."

Well, Ken thought, that makes sense – and where was surprise? It was funny how inevitable it felt, as if this had been exactly what they'd been watching for ever since that night in Kawasaki. Here someone was inviting them into the slaughterhouse, all but holding open the door and waving them through, never mind the man with the knife stood in the shadows – and all Ken was thinking was _oh_.

(It wasn't as if any of this was exactly new.)

"That's a bit of a leap, isn't it?" Youji said.  
"Not really," Ken said. "We did just try and kill her."  
"Touché, Ken, but look at the stunt they just pulled. We can't be the only people in town want to have a word with these guys. Reporters." Youji snapped his fingers. "Why can't they be targeting reporters? We're probably not the only people reading this guy's mail."  
Omi sighed, resting his brow in his palm, looking for all the world like a kid frowning over a difficult assignment. "But not everyone knows about Kasamatsu," he said. "Kritiker kept his name out of the papers. The only people outside of Kritiker who even know he was there when Andou died are all with this Verwandlung group."  
"Us, then." Aya turned away. As if that was all that needed to be said. To him, maybe it was.

And that – it's us they want – that meant it was a set-up. A trap, baited and checked, poised to spring. Omi closed the email, stared blankly at Kasamatsu's overburdened inbox as if, somewhere in between the junk mail and the irritated demands of out-of-the-loop associates, he'd find some kind of answer. Something to put between the four of them and the inevitable, something that meant they didn't have to do this, and do it for nothing at that…

"So," Ken said, because someone had to say it, "what're we gonna do? Ignore it?"  
"We can't ignore it." That was Aya again. Who died and made him boss? "They're trying to draw us out. We ignore this, all they'll do is try something else."  
The worst thing about it was he was most likely right. Omi nodded, eyes grave. "And if they do that, and we don't see it coming… I know it's not much of a choice, Ken-kun, but I think this way is probably better. At least," he said hopefully, "we'll find out what they want, right?"  
"Right," Ken said. If Omi wanted better ideas, he was looking at the wrong guy.

Better to walk, eyes open, into the trap you saw coming than fall into the one you didn't.


	7. Fehler: A single step

Dark beasts, by their very nature, stuck to the shadows. By day they blended in, faceless and blameless and lost to the crowds; it was only in darkness that they shed their everyday skins and let themselves run wild…

Of course, a guy could say exactly the same things about Weiss. Florists were supposed to be harmless, weren’t they?

9:40 PM. Maybe cities never slept, but with the shops shuttered and the streets grown dark and cold, even Tokyo could manage to ease off a bit. Youji – cold, tense, watchful – looked up and into the leftover light of the city and saw nothing but the waning moon snared by strips of floating cloud. Sighing and shaking his head (there were never any stars) he ran one gloved hand along the sleeve of his coat. Yup, definitely Autumn again. I, he thought, and even the thought felt tired and stale, am getting too old for this.

“Why,” he muttered, “can’t targets ever meet at lunchtime like normal human beings…”  
Ken hadn’t been supposed to overhear, but he must have done. He turned, gave Youji a funny look. “Because they’re all werewolves. Are we doing this or what?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He simply turned away, pushing between two overgrown bushes and scrambling away down an embankment, down to where Yaeko Nishida almost certainly wasn’t waiting for anyone at all. Youji shivered and followed, only to stop short at the top of the rise. Well, he thought, that doesn’t look promising.

It was a construction site. A dramatist’s dream of bare concrete, naked girders and torn plastic billowing in the slight night breeze, snared in a tangle of scaffolding in the middle of a bare and rutted square of earth. A smaller building, almost complete, crouched alongside the half-finished main block. It had been almost complete for several months, and already it was falling back into ruin, a few weeds sprouting about its sides and winding cautious tendrils of green up its bare walls. There were no cranes, no diggers or cement mixers – just piles of damaged bricks and split bags of mortar, and a dilapidated and weather-beaten pre-fabricated cabin that might once have served as the site office and now was nothing at all.

Even the warning signs were the worse for wear, their cautions half-lost beneath a tangle of graffiti, blotted out by flyers for club nights and fire sales. Youji ignored them just as completely as whatever kid had cut the hole in the cyclone fence had done, slipping through the gap in the wire and cursing as his coat snagged on one of the cut ends.

No, Nishida wasn’t going to be anywhere near this place. Nobody would prime such an obvious trap with live bait.

“Damn,” Ken said to nobody in particular. “This really looks like a set-up…”

Thank you for that, Ken, but I don’t think the rest of us had missed that bit. The last thing Nishida was going to trade that old laboratory for was another waterfront deathtrap— Youji didn’t say anything. Annoying though Ken’s tendency to state out loud things everyone else was already aware of was, the kid was probably just tense. Hell, they were all tense. Better to focus on the fact of the trap and thank whatever God might still be inclined to look on him kindly that whoever was behind tonight’s little diversion, at least it wasn’t anybody he’d wanted to trust. Not this time.

(The bitch is dead.)

“Come on,” Ken was whispering. “What is this, a movie? Why can’t she meet the guy in a bar?”  
Youji raised his eyes heavenward, resisted the urge to sigh. Okay, Hidaka, your slack stops there. “Try a cemetery. She’d need a medium, Ken, or have you forgotten?”  
“Yeah, but say she didn’t—”  
“Ken-kun,” Omi said quietly. “Please.”

Someone’s still out there. Watch your back.

Presume we’re being followed. Presume this is about to get very bad very fast. Stood with Aya by the sagging pre-fab, Youji watched as Omi peered cautiously in through the verdigrised windows, crossbow poised. Looking for the shadow that fell where no shadow should have done, for the damp and sickening shine of eyes open in the darkness; listening for the subtle shift that told a tale of another person, keeping as still and as silent as they could.

“Christ!”

Youji flinched. _Ken_. Ken had tried the door.

Recoiling, one hand to his mouth, Ken stood frozen with one hand on the door handle, his eyes wide and gaze fixed on something lying just inside the decaying shack. Youji hurried over, he followed Ken’s gaze: he caught his breath, raised his eyebrows, pulled a face. Quick and anxious, Omi traded glances with Aya. At least, Youji thought, there was no blood…

It had been a man, a man in a worn jeans and a heavy jacket, disheveled but clean-shaven and not much older than Youji was. He lay on his front on the mottled floor, head canted unnaturally to one side and bruises circling his throat. His eyes were wide and milky, his lips parted: he looked confused. It had been fast, at least. Youji stared at him; he forced himself to look away. To look at the battered rucksack stood in the shadows in one corner of the cabin and the tarpaulin tacked carefully up over one window, the thin futon with its neatly-folded pile of moldering blankets, the stack of newspapers and empty bottles. The dead man had called this place home, and he’d died for the presumption.

Omi crept cautiously into the cabin to crouch by the dead man’s side and went through the motions of checking for a pulse they all knew he would never find, drawing off one glove and pressing his fingers to the vagrant’s cooling throat. He shook his head.

“An hour,” he said softly. “Maybe two. No more.”  
You didn’t argue with Omi when it came to things like that. “Any chance,” Youji said, because someone had to and Ken was too busy looking quietly freaked to contribute, “whoever did this has already cleared out?”  
“Unlikely,” Aya said. And, “Keep your eyes open.”

Nobody needed to be told that, either.  
____

“Told you they’d go for it.”

She didn’t belong there. Stood in the shadow of a pillar just inside the shell of the main building’s top floor, the girl would have looked less out of place in a nightclub than roaming Rinkai-cho waiting for trouble to find her. Dressed in red and black, in a cropped jacket and a silly, fussy little skirt, she looked like a dancer in a pop video or (more likely) a character in one of those violent cartoons they watched over here: she simply didn’t look right. As if this was all a joke, a game… Nobody had thought to ask if he minded and he was professional enough to know to keep his mouth shut but Christ, if he had to work with a kid at all, what was wrong with a crop-haired nineteen-year-old with an SA80?

A smile on her face, her dark curls caught and tumbled by the night breeze, Komachi Segawa was carefree as a child on a climbing frame. The girl was playing.

Well. High time she stopped. “They did not,” Winters said; Komachi blinked her too-pale, too-bright eyes and bristled, as if he had spoken simply to annoy her. Why’ve you always got to rain on the parade, Winters? “They are all too wary. Besides even if they were not warned when they arrived, they certainly will be watching now. I told you that you were only to silence him.”  
“The tramp?” The girl laughed. It wasn’t a schoolgirl’s giggle. “Come on. The President said no witnesses. And anyway, who’s going to miss him?”  
“The man would have been no witness. He did not trouble us.”  
“You think he wouldn’t have heard something?” Komachi retorted, catching at her curls and pulling them back into a high ponytail. “I’ve saved us the time. And who _cares_ if they’re on their guard, it’s more fun this way.”

Fun. Yes, this was a damned game all right.

Oh, but she was trouble, was this one. More trouble than she was worth. Pretty, sweet-faced, primly respectable little Komachi Segawa, the psychopath next door. If it hadn’t been this it would only have been something else, sooner or later – infanticide maybe, or one of those Angel of Death nurses. The cops and the services sure as Hell wouldn’t have touched her. How had Yamanouchi gotten hold of her, anyway? God only knew where you went to find girls like this, mad little bitches who didn’t belong anywhere except for prison or the morgue…

Winters narrowed his eyes, gazed down across the muddy yard at the figures clustered about the dilapidated cabin: four of them, all male, all – even from here he knew it for sure – all of them kids, all well on the wrong side of twenty-five. The enemy, already watchful, already half-fearful and on their guard, moving with a desperate, hopeless stealth and who’d send these four to do a man’s job? The smallest, little more than a boy, slipped back through the door and closed it silently behind him; the rangy blonde from Andou’s laboratory looked around and up, in entirely the wrong direction, then falling into step behind the kid. Moving out.

(They didn’t look right there, either.)

“Hey, grandpa? Cat got your tongue?”  
He didn’t reply. Winters simply keyed the comm. he wore in one ear and muttered, “And we’re go.”  
“Sir,” Komachi said, “ _yes_ sir.”

And she grinned, and swung herself onto the web of scaffolding that cocooned the building, and vanished.  
____

But Ken saw other things, too. He noticed movement, noticed shadows falling where no shade should have been. He saw patterns, saw the breaks in them: you put up with the dumb shit he said – or at least you did if you had any sense – because sure, nine times out of ten he wasn’t telling you anything you hadn’t picked up on, but what happened when he was? Annoying though wide-eyed comments about empty rooms being, in fact, empty were, Ken didn’t only state the obvious. He stopped short, he tensed so suddenly that Youji almost walked into him, and very nearly ended up with a face full of metal for his pains.

“Christ _dammit_ Youji!” 

Ken hadn’t shouted, but he’d wanted to. The boy shoved him away, took an angry pace backward, raised his head. He was thinking about something else. Ken was staring, to Youji’s eyes, in entirely the wrong direction and that (oh, _crap)_ that meant they’d all missed something. That—

“Ken? What’s the holdup?”  
“Ssh,” Ken hissed. “Shut _up_!”

—that meant Ken had seen something, and that could only mean trouble.

The plastic, Youji decided, was a bad joke. Wind-plump, billowing like the torn sails of a ghost ship, if Ken figured he’d caught something under all that Christ alone knew what it was. There’s nothing there, Ken, he wanted to say – just the stark, truncated form of the building trapped in its web of scaffolding, and the ragged sheets of plastic flapping listlessly in the breeze. Nothing out of place, nothing even remotely sinister, this side of the set dressing but since when had Ken been so jumpy that set dressing alone would put the wind up him?

There had to be something there, someone. Someone, Youji knew, had broken into this site and killed the tramp in the cabin, someone who knew they were coming and didn’t want any witnesses to… to what? Someone who was still out there somewhere – and all he could see was shadows and the leftover light of the city, all he could hear was the swish of cars on the expressway and the snap and rustle of the plastic. No movement. No flickering shadows, no crunch of footsteps on gravel. Nothing…

But a dead man lay on his back in a rotting cabin, and Ken stared fixedly at nothing at all, muscles tensed, barely daring to breathe. You couldn’t tell Ken he hadn’t seen anything, pretend this wasn’t the set-up it so obviously was, but did that mean the trap had to spring now?

“Shit,” Ken muttered, and turned to run.

Yeah, that really had been too optimistic by half. Youji – now just wait a goddamned minute, kid! – reached out to catch Ken by the shoulder, to stop him short and demand he tell him what he’d seen: his fingers closed briefly on the worn leather of Ken’s jacket, and then on nothing at all as the boy pushed past him, pulled away.

“Ken-kun?” Omi, eyes wide, peered past Aya in simple confusion. “Are you all ri…”  
Ken turned briefly, locking eyes with Omi over one shoulder. “Company!”

And he was gone, scrambling up and over a pile of debris and down the other side in a sharp, harsh skitter of sliding gravel, feet scraping slightly as he lost his footing, then breaking back into a run—

“Well,” Youji said in his normal voice, because why bother whispering now? “that answers that question. Now what, O genius leader?”  
Split up, that much was obvious (thanks for everything, Hidaka), but define that, if you please. Omi might have sighed; he certainly looked like he wanted to. Well, building a Ken Is A Dumbass Exemption Clause into every single plan he came up with had to be getting old. “Someone’s got to go after him,” Omi said. “I mean, we have no idea how many people are out there, do we?”  
And knowing Ken he’d run into at least half of them. “True,” Youji said. “You want me to…”  
“No, Youji-kun,” Omi said. “I think I’d better go.”  
Well, he shouldn’t have wanted to in the first place. “Suit yourself. Watch your back, hey, kid?”

Omi nodded, of course he would; he gave Youji a small smile and good luck returning _that_ one. Youji gave it his best shot anyway, but the smile felt tight and strange on his face. Good job this wasn’t a proper mission, or it’d already be a total fuckup… he stood and watched as Omi walked away, clambering carefully up and over the pile of debris and vanishing down the other side.

And then there were two. Youji pushed back his sleeve, resting one hand atop his watch. Heads up, Kudou: right now you’re the closest thing to an early-warning system we’ve got… He turned to Aya, wondering what the Hell he was supposed to say to him— not that it mattered when Aya was too busy staring at the smaller of the buildings, his jaw set and his eyes burning. The guy wasn’t listening anyway.

For a moment Youji couldn’t work out what Aya thought he was looking at either – and, when all of a sudden he could, he could hardly have accounted it any real blessing. A nothing of a movement as something in the darkness gave a twitch and then he was staring straight at a dead man. 

(Well, you were wondering what else could possibly go wrong.)

Red hair. Green coat. A figure framed in a second-storey window with one hand raised as if in a friendly salute: maybe he couldn’t have seen the grin but Youji knew full well it must have been right in place. Christ! He’d have known that bastard a mile off! You’re dead, he thought— so why wasn’t it any kind of surprise to find _Schwarz_ mixed up in all this? This entire pointless charade had their fingerprints all over it. Youji’s fingers tautened about his watch, and he wished he were drawing his wire about the maniac’s throat again and pulling, pulling. Damn, and it was only dumb luck had stopped him finishing the job last time… You’re _dead_ , Schuldig, he thought: then, wearily, but that didn’t stop us either.

“Oh, great,” Youji muttered. “Was that…”  
“Schwarz,” Aya spat, as if that said it all. Pity he was right.  
“Aya,” Youji said, “you do realize he wanted you seeing that?”  
Aya shot him an impatient look. “That’s not important.”

Better hope you’re right there, Aya. The redhead slipped away, too, drawing his sword and stealing soft as shadow toward the building, all his attention on the figure in the window – as if he feared that, should he look away for even a moment, Schuldig would slip back into the darkness and lose himself there, vanish as suddenly as he had appeared. I haven’t finished with you, Schwarz. Don’t you even think of running…

Like Schuldig would do a dumb-ass thing like that. Why flee from your own trap?

“Aya!”

He’s got us right where he wants us, Fujimiya. You do know that, right?

Maybe that wasn’t important either. If Schwarz had set the bait, Aya would swallow it gladly. Anything for the chance to avenge his family, his sister, and who cared that the girl was safe and whole and living in Nerima? Schwarz had tried to hurt her, to use her for their own ends: the bit where they’d failed, to Aya, was just another one of those unimportant little details. They’d wanted to, that was all that mattered. Duty and common sense could go hang.

His teammates, too. Youji sighed and buried his face in his palm, muttering darkly to himself – this bloody mission! Do I even want to know what else is going to go wrong? – and then he pulled himself together and got over it. Sorry, Aya, we’re a team. I got your back, buddy, whether you like it or not.  
____

It was too dark. Down in the shadow of the building, even the leftover light of the city couldn’t gain much purchase on the gloom. Skidding to a stop on a bare patch of ground that, in the fantasies of whoever designed this half-finished wreck, had probably been intended to be a forecourt, Omi glanced about himself, squinting into the darkness: nothing. Even to his trained eyes, there was nothing to see but the carcass of the building in its prison of scaffolding and flapping polythene and, more distant, the battered old hut, with the door Ken hadn’t quite managed to close behind him swinging back and forth, back and forth in the quickening wind. Too quiet – he hated himself even for thinking it – but that didn’t get him any closer to knowing how, when the silence finally broke, it would happen.

It was too dark, and Ken moved too quickly. Ken couldn’t have had more than two or three seconds on him, but that had been more than enough time for his friend to lose himself completely. Scrambling over the pile of debris, Omi had put a sight on him for a second or two: by the time Omi’s sneakers had touched the dirt on the other side of the heap, Ken had rounded a corner or slipped into a doorway – done something, at any rate – and vanished.

The world held its breath. Whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen soon.

So it was a game, then? Omi nodded. All right then, there were worse things in the world than an enemy who figured he had the freedom to play. That spoke of overconfidence, and the overconfident get sloppy. Yes, Omi figured he could live with a games-player very well indeed. He drew a sedative-tipped dart from the case inside his jacket and, holding it poised between two slender fingers, started to walk toward the shell of the building, past a half-finished covered entryway. All right, then. A game it is…

And someone called Aya’s name. Youji.

_Aya_. Omi stopped short, head snapping up: no, he counseled himself, Youji hadn’t (had he?) sounded afraid. No, that was anger. Youji-kun’s got this, he told himself. Aya… probably he just saw something and thought he had to deal with it alone. _Youji-kun’s got this_. And you? You need to find Ken, before someone else can find him first.

Omi hadn’t considered that anyone might be after him. Distracted by Youji’s cry, he almost missed the soft skitter behind him. _Someone’s there_.

He didn’t think about it. He pivoted, the dart flying from his fingers toward the figure behind him—

Watched, wide-eyed, as they caught it in one black-gloved hand.

“ _You_?”

It was a girl. A girl in black and red, with her tumbled black curls pulled back in a high ponytail and a confident, almost cocky smile on her pretty, pallid face, a smile far too calculated for a girl barely older than he was. Her eyes – pale, pale blue, but too much so – practically sparkled with mirth. So that’s Player One…

It was her all right. The same girl who had reminded him of Ouka, the girl who’d cross-examined him over a bouquet of carnations (hey, Omi, why do we never meet anyone normal?) but whatever resemblance Omi had seen, or fancied he had, to his dead sister it was nothing but a memory now. She was trouble. She was a target. She was – he knew it without having to ask – this girl was with Verwandlung.

“Me,” she said. “So, Mr. Shopkeeper. Is this what you’d call stock taking, then?” And, still smiling, she cast the dart to the ground.  
“This isn’t a game.” Omi reached for another dart. “You’re protecting Nishida, aren’t you?”  
The girl’s smile didn’t so much as waver. “What a nasty mind you’ve got,” she said airily. “Perhaps I was just passing through.”  
“Where is she?”  
“Not here,” the girl said. “But then you’d guessed that already. Hadn’t you?”

And _now you see it_ – sudden and neat as a conjuring trick, there was a knife in the girl’s hand. A black-handled stiletto switchblade, the point snapping into place with an audible _click_. For a moment she simply held it to the light as if to show it to him, smiling – then she sprang, running at him with a banshee scream. She moved too soon. The second dart whistled just shy of one shoulder and a miss, in this game, was as good as a mile: Omi snatched for another, but before he could find his range the girl was upon him and it was all he could do to bring the thing up fast enough to parry the stiletto’s first, wild thrust.

She was fast. Very fast. She moved like a dancer and she struck like a wildcat: dammit, who taught this girl to move? She was good, very good – so much for overconfident! – and too damned close for him to find the advantage! Omi parried, launched a clumsy offensive, gripping the dart like a knife: the girl drew back, she laughed in his face, the stiletto describing a parabola though the air as she struck again, fast and deadly as any scorpion. She was trying to _kill_ him—! Heaven only knew how but Omi blocked it, catching the blade on the point of the dart.

“You’re good!”

Omi said nothing. He simply came for her again, wild and desperate: she darted back, the point of the dart catching her across one shoulder. The girl flinched, she reached up to wipe at the blood – she still smiled. Why the Hell was the woman smiling?! Omi stared wildly at her, feeling something inside him give a sick twist. She was enjoying this.

“I like you!” The girl laughed. “And there I was thinking you’d be a letdown!”  
It shouldn’t have stung. It shouldn’t have mattered what a girl like this thought of him. “You shouldn’t!” Omi cried – he gasped as the girl made another series of quick, darting lunges with the knife, searching for an opening. Desperately parrying, hissing in shock and sudden agony as the stiletto laid open the flesh of his left arm, Omi jumped back and clear, setting his teeth against the pain. No. Later. You can think about that later. “We haven’t even begun!”  
____

—no, he’d definitely seen someone. They just hadn’t gone inside, that was all, or hadn’t stayed there. One or the other.

It wasn’t until he actually reached the skeleton of the main building that Ken began to have second thoughts, and even that was mainly because the place looked about as welcoming as a parking garage, and would have been a deathtrap even without the dark beasts. Hesitating by a hole wide enough for a pair of double doors – now this was the kind of place you found a body – he peered into the concrete shell and wondered if he could get away with passing on this one. Pools of burnished, leftover light spilled from the empty window frames, puddles of filthy water glistened on the rutted concrete floor: all he was thinking was _oh, come on_. How dumb did these guys think he was?

Like he’d needed any more confirmation Nishida was nowhere near this place. Even a woman who’d happily hung out in Andou’s excuse for a laboratory for – well, for however long she’d been in there would have drawn the line at a dump like this.

Someone was, though.

Well, not like it’s gonna get any nicer in there. Glancing quickly about himself (damn but it was quiet out there, so much so he could almost imagine he’d imagined seeing anything at all), Ken slipped through the gaping entryway and into nothing at all. Nothing but a echoing, cavernous space stinking of damp and rot. His footsteps echoed off the naked walls; dirty water seeped into his shoes and spattered the cuffs of his jeans.

Someone’d had ambitions for this place, this vast, empty, pointless nothing, haunted by shadows and falling to decay. They were there in the gaping, almost floor-length cavities opening out on the muddy yards, crying out for sheets of plate glass and something, anything to face onto; there in the sweep of shallow steps leading up to a second level, to a damp plaster wall speckled with mold, a pair of grim black portals opening onto nothing at all. They were there in the corridors leading off into perfect darkness, into the bowels of this crumbling wreck of a building…

Which was all very well and creepy, but it wasn’t simply the atmosphere that was working on him.

(Just tell me one thing. Who’s hunting who?)

He wasn’t alone in here. Ken knew that as surely as he knew that even to move was to betray himself. The silence was too heavy, the shadows too thick and he, Christ damn it, couldn’t see for looking! He knew it, though. He could feel the weight of a stranger’s eyes; could sense, in the very deliberateness of the silence, someone else’s waiting presence. 

Yeah, I get it. The hunter hunted, with you. What absolute bullshit! Ken kept moving, headed for the steps because he had to go somewhere, and all hugging the shadows would do was prolong the game he was already tired of playing. Screw the mind games, let’s just get this over with and get out of here— so he made for the stairs, walking that one bit too fast. Well, you know what they say about moving targets. Just keep moving and keep your eyes open, and hope like Hell whoever’s out there hasn’t heard it too.

And nothing happened. Ken stopped. He turned, gazing back into the gloom, hands hanging loose by his sides. "All right,” he said, because he had to say something. “I’m waiting—”

A single shot.

Ken dropped. He dived for the floor as soon as he saw the muzzle flash, dropping and rolling as the bullet whipped harmlessly overhead and buried itself in one of the walls. Too high, fuck it! Too high to be anything but a warning shot. Fuck, we _are_ playing! His ears ringing, damp seeping into his clothes, Ken mentally ran through a litany of obscenity, locker-room curses and soldier’s slang, all meaning nothing but _God I’ve been dumb_. A gun. Of course the bastard had a fucking gun, why hadn’t he realized that?! Cover, he was thinking frantically, where the Hell’s the goddamn _cover_ , Christ but Youji’s gonna have a field day with this one!

He scrambled up, because it beat lying there and letting the bastard pick him off. He ran for the shadows – another shot; Ken ducked, he spat a curse, he ran for it; had that gone wide or had he just gotten lucky? – pressing himself back against the wall and baring the claws on his bugnuks for all the good it would fucking do him. Couldn’t even see the bastard! and if he’d gotten his angles wrong the guy could probably pick him off where he stood… now what the fuck was he supposed to do!?

Should have thought about that before, Hidaka. Bit late to start now!  
____

“ _Ken_ -kun!”

Omi’s head snapped up, his eyes wide and horrified; the girl was all but forgotten as he turned to stare frantically at the building’s half-finished shell, the breath catching in his throat. Oh, no… Ken didn’t carry a gun. What was going on in there? He’s all right, he told himself, he’s got to be all right: hope, just hope, and a forlorn hope at that. Ken-kun, please stay safe: it wasn’t a mission and it wasn’t worth dying for and for a single breathless moment nothing could have mattered, nothing at all, more than getting to him.

He might even have broken away, run right after him, but a flash of movement and a sudden shout had him whipping back round, arms raised—

“Go to Hell!”

After you!

He turned and Komachi was upon him. Contorted features, flying hair, a blur of red-and-black and light flashing on a blade: Omi yelped, more in surprise than fear; he threw himself sideways as the stiletto tore down again, lunging for the exposed flesh of his throat. The blade – he screamed – the blade had missed its mark by inches, scoring a shallow gash along the side of his throat, scything through fabric and flesh to lay open one shoulder. _Later_. Carried forward by her own momentum, the girl stumbled. She lost her footing, half-collapsing against his chest with a cry of alarm and Omi, giddy with shock and drunk on his own adrenalin, drove one elbow hard into her diaphragm.

The breath forced from her, Komachi reeled backward, arms cradled across her chest; she caught her heel on a pothole and then she was falling. She recovered well, turning the fall into a clumsy backward roll and scrambling back up, the knife still gripped tight in one gloved hand. Her bangs falling into her face, her eyes burning, she grimaced as she straightened, one hand pressed protectively to her aching ribs. The smile was gone.

She looked furious, and he was glad of it. No distractions, no more games. Sorry, Ken-kun, but you’re on your own…

“Lucky little bastard!”  
Omi, his bloodied fingers held tight to the torn flesh of his neck, met her eyes; he reached for another dart. “We’ll see.”  
____

Of course Aya didn’t give a damn if Youji was backing him up or not; too bad Youji didn’t give a damn about that. An Aya letting his heart rule his head was a loose cannon in every sense of the word and every bit as liable to blow up in your face as he was in anybody else’s and while that still might not, to borrow a phrase, have frightened a guy like Schuldig, it sure scared the Hell out of Youji. An angry Aya was not an Aya at his best, and if he was going to tangle with Schwarz he was going to have to be better even than that…

So Youji followed him. He shadowed the redhead to the second, smaller building – past piles of debris not worth the time to salvage or to steal, past propped-up rolls of filthy fiberglass, a skip filled near to overflowing with refuse, a sagging sawhorse with one leg sheared clean away – pushing open the double doors, and stepping inside.

A few months back, or however long ago it had been before the site was abandoned, the building must have been nearly ready for use. Now the carpet tiles that covered the entrance hall were lifting at the edges and the white-painted walls were mottled with the first bloom of encroaching mold while bundles of wires, no doubt intended for light fittings, sprouted from the ceilings like clumps of matted hair. If Schwarz were really hanging out in a place like this (and damn the evidence of his own lying eyes, Youji would have been happier to know there was nothing there and he should probably talk to a neurologist) it sure wouldn’t be to soak in the ambiance.

“Aya,” Youji murmured to Aya’s turned back, “you sure you wanna go through with this?”  
“You don’t have to come,” was all Aya said: well, what do you know, he’s deigned to answer. Could be worse, Youji told himself, at least he remembers you’re there.

Not that he bothered to look back. Aya crossed the lobby in a few long strides, pushing open a door and slipping into a long, dark corridor smelling of stale air and damp plaster and, with Youji sticking close as a shadow, from there into an echoing stairwell illuminated by a series of smeared windows. Youji. The door to the hallway swung silently to behind them as they climbed, their slow, deliberate footsteps, for all their caution, seeming to sound perilously loud. Damn it all, it’s still too quiet!

So much for surprise, but Schwarz had to have known they were coming even before they did. The best Youji dared hope for was not to be blindsided himself. You’ve walked into a trap, Kudou. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get to walk out again…

(And if we’re very, very lucky, we all will – but really now, how likely is that?)

Second floor and they might as well start there as anywhere. Aya cautiously pushed open the stairwell door; Youji held his breath, waiting for any telltale squeaks or creaks but the door kept their secret, swinging open silently as he could have wished. Stealing after Aya into the gloom of the hallway – carpet here, too; that was good, for all it was peeling and reeked of mold – Youji followed his teammate as he, sure-footed and determined, slipped quiet as a ghost down the corridor and stopped short by an invitingly open door, katana poised.

Youji glanced over at Aya, raised his eyebrows. You reckon we should knock? 

Aya simply scowled. _Schwarz_.

Schwarz. There it is: the bait, the jaws of the trap, poised and ready to spring. You’re dead, Youji thought again: too bad nobody’d thought to tell Crawford that. The tall American, arms folded, stood in a pool of light in the center of the empty room, silhouetted against the grimy full-length windows; Schuldig lolled against the rear wall, head tipped back, and when he met Youji’s eyes he grinned. Schwarz were waiting and they were game.  
____

“I did think,” the foreigner said, “we would be meeting again.”

Still tall. Still blonde and pale and sardonic, with eyes as cold and hard as chips of ice, still dressed, from head to foot, in a bodyguard’s basic black. David Winters, his smoking pistol held firm in both outstretched hands, padded out into the center of the room. Eyes narrowed, he regarded Ken down the barrel of his gun with the detached, assessing air of a scientist – or of a professional soldier. Every inch the hunter and that, Hidaka, makes you…

Okay, smartass, you made your point.

“That’s nice,” Ken said. He straightened, stepped from the shadows: why pretend he had anywhere to hide? “You miss me or something?”  
“Not fully.” Winters’s lips twisted at the corners, as if he were trying to smile; his eyes stayed cold. “But you must realize that you are an unusual child.”

An unusual what? Ken, coiled-spring tense and poised to strike, met head-on the challenge of Winters’s stare; he took a single slow step to the side, and then another and realized, with a sudden onrush of something that felt very like relief, that he was angry. Who are you calling a child, buddy? It would have been nice to kid himself that was a relic of Winters’s wonky Japanese. Christ, what kind of a cold hard bastard was he dealing with now? This guy (keep moving, for God’s sake keep moving, a moving target’s harder to hit) this guy was before he was born.

But if all the foreigner saw when he looked at him was a skinny, narrow-shouldered kid playing grown-up games he didn’t quite understand – that was something, wasn’t it, he could work with?

“Shut up,” Ken said.  
Winters quirked a brow. “Shut up?” he said. “You’re not much of a one for talking, correct?”  
“Fuck talking!”

No choice. I don’t have _time_ for this!

It wasn’t a plan. There was no time for anything as reasoned as that. Ken simply sprang for the man, swift and silent, suddenly all lethal direction as the claws of his bugnuks snapped back into place. Get the gun, he was thinking: to Hell with better ideas! Just get the goddamned _gun_ —

And Winters narrowed his eyes; he fired. He fired too soon. Ken dropped, lowering his head – the crack of the shot, the bullet singing over one shoulder and ricocheted off the wall, spinning off into nothing at all – barreling into Winters’s midsection, knocking the gun from his hands, knocking the man from his feet. Winters fell, Ken on top of him, landing heavily in a puddle and kicking up a foul-smelling spray of still water and mud as the gun clattered to the ground and skittered off to get lost in the shadows.

Winters spat something in English, something which had the shape and weight of a curse: if the meaning was lost on Ken, the right to the jaw wasn’t. He followed it up with a knee to the solar plexus and, the breath knocked from his body, pain bursting across his ribs, Ken doubled over, falling backward. He landed heavily on his back, blinking back stars, struggling to draw air into his lungs as Winters scrambled to his feet, eyes darting this way and that as he cast about himself for his missing gun. Ken raised his head just in time to see Winters aim a hard, brutal kick at his ribs and, with a yelp of surprise, he rolled away and scrambled back to his feet, wiping at his mouth, spitting.

He looked back up and Winters was watching him. And the man smiled, and said something in English, and came for him again.

“Son of a bitch!”

Winners strike first. Winters ducked away as Ken threw himself forward, swiping wildly at him with the bugnuks, the claws catching him a glancing blow across the chest: a hiss of indrawn breath through clenched teeth told a tale of hard-repressed pain. _Got you_ —but, recovering well (shit, _shit_ , that could have gone better!) the man surged forward again, aiming a forceful kick for the boy’s legs: Ken sprang back, dodging away; he barely had time to find his feet before Winters was aiming another blow for head or neck or chest and he ducked, blocking the blow on one forearm and aiming a clumsy kick at the man’s shins—

And Winters kicked him, hard: white flared behind his eyes as pain budded and bloomed in one knee and Ken heard himself screaming, felt himself fall. Fuck. _Fuck_. Tears sprang to his eyes; he blinked them back, dragging himself up onto his elbows, lashing out blindly with one hand as Winters drew closer. Stay back. Stay back, you sonofabitch – Jesus _fuck_ this man was good! Better than good: he forced his feet back under him, another bolt of agony shooting up his injured leg as he staggered against the wall. Couldn’t take many more like that and walk away from this one!

Needed an opening. Needed out of here. You’re not going to win this fight, Hidaka: best you can hope for is to walk away. So move it, you stupid bastard. Move…

Too little too late, God damn it! Shouldn’t have tangled with this bastard. Should never have been here at all and what the fuck did knowing that help? Footsteps echoed in the corridor, the sound of running feet: Ken turned just in time to see the newcomer launch themselves down the stairs toward him, shrieking fit to wake the dead. Scarred and pale as bone, their single eye bright with mania. Farfarello. _Schwarz_.

“What the Hell—!”  
____

He didn’t look phased. Say what you would about Crawford, Aya had to give him that much at least. The three-foot blade, the look of furious direction on Aya’s pale face… all of it, to Crawford, was just so much eyewash. The serene, confident little smile didn’t leave his lips as Aya strode toward him: the American didn’t so much as blink as the sword plunged toward him, as the redhead struck—

As Schuldig caught the flat of the blade between both hands. 

“Nice try, though!”

Schuldig’s grin was mocking, it was maddening, and yet for a moment Aya could do nothing but stare. Already off-balance, already thrown – already (since when did you get so weak?) guiltily thinking better of the whole thing. Where had _Schuldig_ come from, who taught that bastard to move? Crawford simply stood and watched, smile screwed tightly into place, meeting Aya’s startled eyes over Schuldig’s forest-green shoulder. Like he’d seen it all before…

Only a little bit of the future, he’d told Aya once, but a little was more than enough.

“This,” Youji said from somewhere behind him, “is going well.”  
Ah, wit. Crawford’s eyes flickered over to Youji for a moment, then back. “I won’t say _what a surprise_ ,” he said coolly: why shouldn’t he smile? He had Weiss exactly where he wanted them and they all knew that, too. “And there I was wondering this might be a shade too obvious for you.”  
Like he didn’t know! “Don’t underestimate me,” Aya growled. “We’ve got our reasons—”  
“Sure,” Schuldig said. “Sure you have. But that’s not why you’re here. Is it?”

And, letting go of the sword, he aimed a kick at Aya’s midsection, darting away as he fell back then moving forward again, landing two three four hard blows to Aya’s head and shoulders before the young man had a chance to react. Aya staggered, blinking – yes, this is going well – riding with the pain as Schuldig sprang clear, easily evading the katana’s next clumsy swing.

“Aya!”

Youji – Christ, that dumb kid! – Youji simply sounded angry. Instinct had him going for the wire, yanking a cobweb-fine skein from his wristwatch and moving for Schuldig as Aya ducked clear. _This is gonna get messy_ : Crawford stepped up to the plate, undoing his collar button and loosening his immaculately-knotted tie before surging forward and snatching for Youji’s wrist. The blonde spat a curse, twisted in his grasp, aimed a savage kick at Crawford’s midsection – and then Schuldig was on him again and Youji could have been safe back home for all it mattered. Schuldig smiled at him and Aya moved, but when the sword scythed down the German wasn’t even there.

“Damn you,” Aya hissed. “Get back here!”  
“I don’t think so,” said Schuldig, and laughed.

(Focus. He’s angry, already too angry to think. There’s Schuldig, a dead man sprung up, and it’s up to him to see the bastard’s put down again for good – but she’s safe now, they both are: he has no power over you. _Focus_ , something whispers to him in a voice that sounds a lot like Shion’s. This isn’t the way, Ran. Focus…

(But this man hurt his sister, and Sakura, too: Aya wasn’t listening. You think this is a joke, you bastard?)

“Hey,” Schuldig said airily, “is it my fault you’re amusing?”  
Don’t rise to it. That’s exactly what he’s counting on. Aya started, grip tightening about the hilt of his katana—no. Don’t rise to it. “A _mu_ sing?”  
“Amusing,” Schuldig repeated. “Take this whole business – whoops, careful where you wave that thing! – all that trouble over your dear sister.” Don’t rise to it: damn it, Aya thought, he’s dancing! Two steps forward then swaying back, hands raised, as Aya came at him again, Schuldig might have been dancing with him as fighting for his life. God almighty, he thinks this is fun? “Nothing to say, Aya? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about it already.”  
Don’t rise to it. “Leave her out of this, Schuldig!”  
“Oh, but I don’t want to. Such a sweet little thing. And so pretty, too. It was a shame to lose her so quickly. Crawford had such high hopes for her…”  
“Damn you!”

(No. _No_. She’s safe now. This has nothing to do with her!)

It didn’t matter.

Of course Schuldig had seen it coming. Aya swung for him, slashing violently down with the sword; Schuldig jumped nimbly clear and, before Aya could recover, kicked savagely at his bent knee. 

Aya fell. Landed face-down in an awkward sprawl, the breath knocked from his lungs, his entire body jarred by the sudden impact. The katana slipped from his grasp, clattered to the floor to lie by his side: instinctively he groped for it, fingers brushing briefly against the hilt before Schuldig brought his heel down on the back of Aya’s outstretched hand, trapping it against the floor while he kicked the sword from his reach. Aya winced, bit back a gasp of pain, tried to tug his hand free, and Schuldig simply laughed, and pressed his foot down harder.

“Think about it,” he murmured, crouching down to look Aya in the face. “Don’t you think she’s too old for pigtails? She’s not a little girl any more, Aya. But then you’d be the last one to notice that now, wouldn’t you.”  
“Bastard,” Aya spat – and all he was thinking was, what does he mean? Not a little… what the Hell’s he trying to imply?  
Schuldig smiled indulgently. “Oh, you’re a bright guy. I’m sure you can work it out—”

A startled cry. The sound of splintering wood.

Schuldig frowned, and pushed himself upward. Aya raised his head. What the Hell…?

Crawford stood by the window, gazing incuriously over one shoulder through the empty frame of one of the full-length windows, the night wind tugging at the ends of his hair, the fabric of his shirt. Utterly composed. Feeling the shock on his own face, Aya simply stared at him; at the gaping hole where, five minutes before, there had been a rattling pane of dusty glass. There was no sign of Youji.

“Funny,” Crawford said calmly. “I thought cats landed on their feet.”  
____

Oh, God. This is bad.

Ken stumbled forward, forcing himself to ignore the pain that, with every other step, shot up his leg. Metal clashed with metal as he caught the end of Farfarello’s sai on the bugnuk claws, kicked out wildly at chest or leg or who cared what, driving the madman back – for now. It wasn’t enough. It would have to do. Door. Where the fuck was the fucking door!? He scrambled back and away, falling back against the wall as he cast about himself wildly for – or anything, as long as it was an exit.

And Farfarello drew nearer, a humorless grin twisting his full lips: don’t panic. Don’t panic. Stop thinking about it and move. Move, Goddamn it, just _move_ , you’ve got to get out of here, got to do it fast. Farfarello alone was bad enough, Winters alone was – but like this? This was defeat, this was – you’re going to die, Ken realized with sudden dreadful clarity. (No. No, that can’t be…) Hidaka, you are going to die.

No.

“Don’t even think it!”

The second blow – cursing, Ken ducked away as the madman’s blade sought out his eye – landed just above his head, the point of the sai scraping harsh against the wall as Ken pushed himself away. Hissing in pain, he scrambled out from beneath Farfarello’s arm and lunging forward, only for Farfarello to bring his elbow down hard on the back of his neck. Ken stumbled and fell, wrapping his arms about his head: he landed awkwardly on one side, momentarily stunned, caught off-guard by the fact he could feel anything at all. Bastard could have killed you. Holy fuck, he really could have—! 

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to collapse forward and wait for the end: he never had done things the easy way. Ken yelped as Farfarello followed him down, rolling away as the sai drove down toward his throat and buried itself harmlessly in the mud by the crook of his shoulder. Shit. Shit. _Move_!

No time to think about it. Blame it on willpower or sheer-bloody-mindedness: the breath burning in his lungs, his entire body alive with pain, Ken forced himself back to his feet, the entire room seeming to swim about him as he stood – and he’s still coming. Holy _fuck_ , the mad bastard was still fucking _coming_! 

“Stay away,” Ken said, and it sounded as stupid and panicky and dumb as it always did in the movies. “Stay back!”

Like Farfarello was going to listen to that! Don’t panic, don’t panic: sure as a nightmare, the madman came for him again and Ken swiped wildly at him with one hand, catching Farfarello across the upper arm and he might not have bothered, damn it! He just kept coming. He swiped the blood away with one pale hand, blinking incuriously at it like it had nothing to do with him, and then he forgot about it. Ken stumbled backward, one arm raised defensively – Christ, just stay back! – as Farfarello prowled towards him, blood coursing down his arm. Oh, God, Ken was thinking. Oh, God, what the Hell do I do now?

Then Winters shot him.

The impact knocked him off his feet. Something slammed into his left shoulder, so sharp and so sudden that for a moment Ken thought Winters must have pushed him over. Too shocked to remember to scream, Ken just about had time to think _oh fuck_ and then he was falling, catching his head a painful blow as his body hit the floor. White flashed behind his eyes, pain bursting in his skull: a split second of exquisite agony, and then nothing but black.  
____

“Don’t touch him.”

Farfarello got there first, bending to the unconscious boy as if he couldn’t quite work out why he should have stopped moving. Winters waved him away with the still-smoking gun – no, you get back – dropping to his knees to press two fingers to the boy’s throat: he nodded. Still breathing, at least. Working quickly, Winters stripped the gauntlets from Ken’s hands and cast them to the floor, followed by the heavy leather jacket and, after a moment of thought, the boots and absurd orange shirt, then bound his wrists securely behind his back with a pair of plastic handcuffs.

So much for the kid. The weapon was rather more interesting. Picking up one of the gloves, Winters held the thing up to the light, puzzling over the mechanism. Looked like… that would be some kind of pressure pad, wouldn’t it? Cautiously he pressed down on it, frowning as, with a soft metal _snick_ , the wicked steel claws slipped free of their housing. Very ingenious: he rubbed absently at his chest, then at his fingers, sticky with his own drying blood. What nasty minds Orientals had. Who on earth would think it was a good idea to arm a teenager with these things?

But that the boy could tell them later. Winters let the glove fall and, getting to his feet, reached for his cellphone.

You couldn’t trust an Irishman. Turn your back on the bastards for more than a few seconds… well, God only knew what they’d get up to! The creak of leather, the rustle of fabric on fabric – Winters hadn’t even finished dialing the American’s number before he turned back to find Farfarello crouched in the dirt at Ken’s side, fingers snagged in the unconscious boy’s untidy hair as he yanked him bodily to his knees. Absorbed as a child torturing ants, he regarded him for a moment, then placed the point of the sai to Ken’s temple. His fingers tensed on the release.

“Stop that! Don’t you speak English, you stupid Mick? I said don’t touch him!”  
And Farfarello looked up, his head canted curiously to one side. “No?” he asked.  
“ _No_ ,” Winters said. “No.”

And leveled the gun at Farfarello’s head.

That the madman understood. Farfarello hissed, dropping Ken to the floor again: the boy pitched bonelessly forward onto his front and lay still.

“And why shouldn’t I?” Farfarello asked, sulky as a disappointed child. He gave Winters a flat, hostile glare; he kicked Ken in the ribs – that was childish, too – as if it were somehow all his fault. The boy didn’t so much as whimper. “Acts,” he hissed. “Chapter twelve, verse twenty-three. And forthwith an angel of the Lord struck him because he had not given the honor to God, and being eaten up by worms he gave up the ghost: there’s a precedent.”  
“Religion,” Winters muttered under his breath, shaking his head. Of course. “I’d like to see you try that on the President when you’re explaining why we had this one right where we wanted and then you lobotomized him. Don’t touch him. We need this boy to talk.”  
____

The first dart had merely grazed her: all that was good for was taking the edge off her a bit. The second, though, had caught Komachi square in the thigh – she cursed viciously, yanked the dart from her leg and cast it contemptuously to the ground; and what was that supposed to achieve, kiddo? After that it was only a matter of time…

Still time enough to die. Thirty seconds, maybe forty – the dart hit the ground with a soft _ting_ and Komachi sprang for him again. Omi leapt back, snatching for another dart. His hand snapped out, the dart flew from his fingers and straight toward her. The girl ducked sideways, the dart nicking a tiny triangle of flesh from her ear as it whipped past her cheek: twenty seconds and still she came, barreling straight into him and knocking him from his feet.

Omi hit the ground hard, crying out in shock and in pain as the impact jarred his shoulders, his spine – and still she came, following him down, knocking the air from him as she landed heavily on his chest, pinning him to the floor with one knee pressed hard against his ribs. Omi bit back a curse, he writhed beneath her (ten, no, fifteen seconds: did he have those left?) as, breathing hard, her cheeks flushed with exertion, Komachi scraped the tip of her stiletto slowly across the exposed skin of his throat. She smiled.

“Bye-bye, Mr. Shopkeeper,” she crooned – and yelped in surprise as Omi rammed the business end of his crossbow under her chin.

Five. Four. Three. Wait for it—

And the girl slumped over, collapsing bonelessly on top of him, her lashes fluttering. The knife slipping from suddenly-unresponsive fingers Komachi groaned as Omi pushed her off him, falling heavily onto her back with her pale eyes half-open. Man – Omi sprang to his feet, another dart poised, just in case, between forefinger and thumb – that really was way too close. Breathing hard, he watched as Komachi rolled onto her front and, from there, forced herself to her hands and knees, slow and deliberate as a drunkard.

“What…” Even her voice sounded sluggish, her tongue thick in her mouth. “Damn it, what the Hell did you _do_ to me?”  
“It’s not fatal.” Omi tucked the dart back in its case. “You’ll be all right, but you’ve probably got about two minutes before you lose consciousness. You should get somewhere safe.”  
The girl raised her head, teeth gritted. “You little—”  
“You really should leave,” Omi said. “You’re hurt and we’re done here. Just call your friends and go.”

He stepped back (three shots, or four: he’d lost count) one hand pressed to the sluggishly-bleeding gash on his neck. Two paces, three – the girl groped clumsily for her knife, clumsily she heaved it at him. Hopelessly wide, it landed harmlessly in the dust some six feet from where Omi was standing, and he sighed. I’m sorry, but you’re through, and I don’t have time for you right now…

“You should go,” Omi said again. “I promise I won’t follow you.”

And turned back to the building, and ran. Hang in there, Ken-kun. I’m coming!  
____

Well, you seem to still be alive.

There should have been stars. Real or imaginary, logic dictated stars and there weren’t any. Just a burnished canopy of off-black, a few threads of floating cloud, and the blank face of a building that could have been half the offices in the city. Opening his eyes – there’d been Crawford and the sudden shock of impact, and then everything had gone suddenly upward – Youji gazed at the sky for a moment or two, trying to work out where he was and why he was still around to do it at all. You just fell out a window, he reminded himself. Surely you should be a bit more dead?

His back ached, and his shoulders; he thought he’d done something to one of his legs. On his back in what looked a lot like a skip, Youji was lying on something soft and foul-smelling that yielded sickeningly beneath him when he tried to sit. Looks like there’s your answer as to why you’re still breathing. And he wanted a shower, which meant he was most likely going to be fine.

“I’m all right,” Youji announced to nobody in particular. “I meant to do that…”

And there, right on cue, was Aya.

Aya, all long violet eyes and cool impassivity, leaning over the edge of the skip like he’d expected nothing less from him. Of course you’re in a skip, Youji, and I’d pull you out if you didn’t seem so at home there – yeah, thanks for that Fujimiya. Whose brilliant idea was this anyway?

“They left,” Aya said tightly.  
“Nice to see you, too.” Grabbing the edge of the skip Youji pulled himself upright, tugging a chunk of filthy fiberglass from his hair. “Thanks for the concern, I’ll treasure it always. I suppose a hand out would be too much to ask for?”

Oh, we’re pretending we didn’t catch that. Right. You got lucky with the skip, Kudou; bit too much to hope that Aya might suddenly have developed an altruistic streak as well. You’re still not his sister, right? Ignoring the throbbing ache in his limbs, the bolt of pain that shot up his back, Youji pulled himself up and over the edge of the skip, half-jumping, half-falling to the ground to land in an awkward semi-sprawl. _Whoa_. Yeah, definitely did something to his leg. Okay, that was a bad idea. Or another one.

Might as well call the skip the fifth member of Weiss at this point. Snatching for a handhold, Youji pulled himself to his feet, leaning heavily back against the skip’s cool metal side and giving the thing a companionable pat. Thanks, man. I owe you one…

Wasn’t gonna be walking out of here, not under his own steam. “ _Ow_. Dammit. Sorry, buddy,” he said, giving Aya a wry, pained smile, “you’re gonna have to lend me your arm…”

Wordlessly, Aya stepped to him, slung Youji’s arm over his shoulder; gratefully, Youji leaned against him, a little more heavily than he’d have liked, testing his weight on his injured foot. No. No, definitely not. He hissed in pain, features briefly contorting into a grimace. God _damn_ it—! yeah, you’re definitely going to be helping me out of here. It was, after all that, the least that Aya could do.

“Thanks.”

All he could do now was hope they didn’t run into any more trouble between here and the car. What would he do, fall over at them?

Aya’s arm about his waist, his fingers digging almost painfully into Youji’s side, the pair made their slow, graceless way back across the debris-strewn yards. Somewhere just beyond the wire a car door slammed, the engine coughing into life as it slipped slowly from the curbside to lose itself on the expressway; Youji stumbled onward, head hanging forward, concentrating on nothing but placing one foot in front of the other. Damn it, the last time he felt like this he’d been staring, bleary-eyed, at a 25,000 yen bar bill. Not like he’d had fun tonight but this, at least, was a damn sight easier on the wallet.

“ _Aya-kun_!”

Aya’s head snapped up. He tried to let go of Youji’s hand. Oh no you don’t, Fujimiya…!

Omi lurched forward out of the shadows, face stricken. Blood streaming down his neck, a bundle of heavy, dark material clasped tight to his chest. Youji met the boy’s eyes, and the look he caught in them chilled him to the bone. Fighting back a wave of dizziness, he glanced about himself, looking for – for what? He didn’t know. All he knew was that look meant trouble. Big, serious trouble: Christ, he thought in sudden, horrible shock, where the Hell is Ken?

“Oh, Aya-kun!”  
Savagely, Aya tried to twist his hand free. No, we’re still not doing that. “What is it?”  
“It’s Ken-kun.”

And Omi’s eyes drifted down, down to the tangle of dark material caught in his arms. Youji followed his gaze. Brown, leather: a jacket, ripped and spattered with grim, dark stains that could only have been blood. Oh, no…

“Ken-kun’s gone.”

_-to be continued-_


	8. Schaden: Into darkness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be aware that as of now the story's rating has been revised from T to M, due to dark and adult themes present in this chapter and beyond.

Okay, Hidaka. There it is: that’s the situation. We always knew it was a possibility. We talked about it. You just didn’t really think about it because you didn’t think it’d be you it’d happen to – but we talked about it. We knew it could happen, and looks like it just did. Occupational hazard. Right. Now what?

Now what?

No. Calm. Stay calm. Think.

Think. Start with the room. All right. Four white-painted walls. A white-tiled floor. A small drain, like something out of someone’s shower, sunk into the corner of the floor. Whatever went on in here (don’t think about it) someone really (don’t think about it) really wanted to keep it clean afterward. Okay. Move on. Heavy white door with a fisheye lens and some kind of electronic door lock. Lever handle, fourteen keys, thousands upon thousands of possibilities and three shots at goal before the damn thing froze you out entirely, dream the fuck on. High window – an aperture, really – set at the very top of the wall: a basement. No options there. Too high. Too narrow. That’s safety glass. Forget the window. What else have you got?

Okay. A mattress. No sheets, no blankets or pillows: just the mattress, covered in teal-blue plastic. A hospital mattress, he’d seen enough of them in his time to know one when he saw one. That made this a hospital, or… or some kind of medical facility, or whoever was in charge here knew someone who worked in one. Not an answer, but maybe it was the start of one. One of those combination toilet/hand basin things, in institutional-standard steel. No way to break the thing apart and improvise a shank out of its innards, at least none that he could see. Whoever they kept in here (don’t _think_ about it!), they didn’t want them thinking about breaking up the fixtures and busting on out…

It’s not good. It wasn’t good long before he got here.

That’s it. An empty room, a sink, a mattress, the air dry and thrice-used, reeking of disinfectant and, beneath it, another, more organic smell – and himself, his feet bare, his wrists cuffed before him and his wounded shoulder clumsily dressed and bandaged. It wasn’t, Ken knew, meant as any sort of kindness. All that meant was they wanted him alive for long enough to be useful, wanted him whole enough to talk. Now tell yourself you’re better than that. Go on, Hidaka: tell yourself you couldn’t possibly. You goddamn idiot!

They didn’t have the others. That was something to hold onto, and Ken clung to it. Last night… the memories were vague, tender to the touch, but he remembered being brought here, wherever here was. Remembered pain, a car journey, stumbling down a flight of narrow stairs, hands under his bound arms forcing him roughly forward, and concrete cold beneath his feet. Remembered falling or being pushed onto the mattress, remembered lying on his front, dizzy and nauseated and numb with pain, and praying, absolutely praying to pass out…

Nobody mentioned the others. There would, at least, have been way more fuss with four. They didn’t have them, they _couldn’t_ : if he believed anything, Ken believed that. Why the Hell would they, anyway? The others weren’t this dumb.

Tiger in a cage, he’s pacing. Ken walked the length of the room, turned, walked back— stopped short, worrying at his lip. He pressed his hands to his face, he closed his eyes and all he was thinking was _oh God._ Oh God, oh my God. They’d talked about this, talked about what might happen, talked about the protocol… Christ, how stupid it sounded. Four guys in a basement playing secret agent and they’re talking about _protocol_. Fuck, it’s goddamn ridiculous! and it doesn’t even help: the job came first and all that _Mission: Impossible_ bullshit…

Words. Just words. Ken sat down heavily on the mattress, burying his face in his hands. Oh, God, he was thinking, just that. Oh, God, I want to go home. What the Hell help were words going to be to him, now?

They hadn’t mentioned the fear. Knew it could happen. It was just never supposed to, that was all.

Stay calm.

Think. _Think_. You’re trapped and you’re wounded and there’s this hard and twisted feeling in the pit of your stomach that isn’t quite nausea and won’t go away – there it is, that’s the situation and if it shouldn’t have happened that’s just too fucking bad. Stay calm. Think about something else. A missing target, a dead and deranged scientist, a sickly girl with fear in her eyes: he thought about Tellus, about Verwandlung and Schwarz. This couldn’t be nothing, because if it had been nothing he wouldn’t have been there at all. So what, Ken asked himself, the Hell do I know? It’s a movie he wasn’t quite watching and turned off forty minutes in, it’s one of Omi’s goddamn textbooks, half-Japanese, half-gibberish. It’s a matter of life and death. What were these guys after, what the Hell did they want?

Who were these people? A psychotic American soldier who really was as tough and as dangerous as he figured he was, the guy who hung round with him and even if he wasn’t foreign he was probably almost as bad, their missing target and her dead buddies and fucking _Schwarz_ , or whatever was left of them – that couldn’t have been all of them _._ This felt too big for that. Too – too controlled, too together. Too goddamn smart.

Verwandlung. _Metamorphosis_. That didn’t sound like good news either.

Ken didn’t get it. He simply didn’t understand. All he knew was this: whatever was going on here, whatever these guys were telling themselves they were doing all this for they wanted it bad enough to kidnap for it, enough even to kill… He ran his hands through his hair, he rested his still-aching head on his knees. He thought, I should be better than this. Shouldn’t have been the one working this shit out. He shouldn’t have been fucking caught—

Door.

Ken’s head snapped up, he scrambled to his feet; he wasn’t thinking anything but Oh, God. Someone (fuck, he hadn’t heard a key!) someone was at the door. The handle clanked softly and started to turn, the door swung silently open on well-oiled hinges, just wide enough to admit a body. Maybe Ken had known it was coming, known damn well that if his captors hadn’t wanted something from him – something, he was prepared to bet, he wouldn’t want to surrender – the American would simply have killed him while he was out: knowing that didn’t help either.

They’re going to try and hurt you. All you can do is brace. Ken closed his eyes, he caught his breath. Hail Mary full of grace— he wondered, stupidly, if it was even worth trying to look angry. Here goes.

“Knock, knock.”

Schuldig and a gun.

Schuldig. Christ, wouldn’t any of these mad bastards just stay dead? Schuldig and a gun, sprawling back against the door and regarding him with all the bored tolerance of a predator at rest. He’d traded in the green coat and stupid white pants for a striped tee-shirt and some kind of casual suit even Youji would have had the sense to steer well clear of but it was him all right, right down to the mop of fiery hair and the alligator smile. What the fuck was _Schuldig_ doing here?

The crazy thing was, he was almost glad of it. Schwarz’s game he could handle.

“You’re dead,” Ken said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.  
Schuldig grinned at him. “I’m bored.”  
Bored. Ken met Schuldig’s eyes, he felt himself start to scowl. He realized, with a sudden rush of relief, that he was irritated. “Well,” he retorted, “that’s your problem then, isn’t it.”

The grin didn’t so much as waver as Schuldig straightened, pushed away from the door, the pistol swinging casually from forefinger and thumb. That was dumb. Ken hoped he kept doing it. End up shooting himself in the foot, like as not… Ken wetted his lips, he watched the gun. He waited. One wrong move, you sonofabitch. Just one wrong move…

“Now that,” Schuldig said, “is not very welcoming of you. You know something, kid? You’re a pretty lousy host.”  
“Oh, I’m sorry. Should I have offered you a goddamn chair?”

Schuldig didn’t reply, at least not immediately. He stalked a step or two closer (Ken tensed, he flexed his fingers; head held high, the boy held his ground), narrow eyes raking up and down the length of his body, taking in his bare feet, his tousled hair, the torn and bloody tee-shirt, the dark, angry eyes. It wasn’t easy to stand and watch Schuldig watch him like that, weighing and measuring and finding him… what? An assessing gaze, that: there was a cool, clinical, purely physical speculation to it that left Ken feeling angry – angry, and yet somehow thrown. Nobody had ever looked at him like that before, nobody had wanted to! What the _Hell_ —

It wasn’t right. This shouldn’t be happening, not like this; there was something about the way Schuldig watched him that simply felt strange, sickening, sickeningly wrong. There’s trouble in the air, and not the kind he was counting on: hey, Hidaka, you sure you know his game?

“Cute,” Schuldig said. “That’s real cute, Ken.”

(What the Hell’s he think he’s doing? What the Hell does he want?)

“Shut up.” Why are you here?  
“Because,” Schuldig said again, “I’m bored. Do try to keep up.” 

And Schuldig was talking to some other guy, and he was Ken as well. For a moment the boy simply stared – eyes wide, lips parted as if he were about to say something, but there was nothing he could say. No words. That’s not it, he was thinking inanely. That’s not it, I didn’t say that…

“You didn’t have to,” said Schuldig, and smiled.  
“What the fuck!”

You don’t play this way, Hidaka. And he’s not playing at all. This was serious, this was bad, no way to win a game like this one and he sure as Hell couldn’t afford to lose. Seconds out, round one: casually tucking the gun into the waistband of his pants (come on, you dumb bastard, shoot yourself, _please_!) Schuldig crossed the distance between them in three long strides, and nowhere for Ken to go but back. He stepped away, cuffed hands defensively raised, eyes darting about the room as he searched for – for anything, for a weapon or for an opening, for a way out. Door. Where the Hell was the door and why, oh why couldn’t he get there without tangling with the Schwarz?

One pace away, two paces: already there was nowhere else to go. Already he was all out of options. Ken’s shoulders struck the rear wall; he heard himself gasp, pulling away as if the touch had burned. Shit. _Shit_! God damn it, that was stupid—!

Schuldig – Jesus fuck, who taught this man to move? – Schuldig was on him in seconds, slamming both hands, palms flat, against the wall either side of his head. Ken spat a curse, he glared up at the man through his untidy bangs. If he focused only on how infuriatingly tall the guy was (not the breath that came hot against his cheek, not the calculating, almost carnal look in Schuldig’s narrow eyes), on how much he wanted to punch the smirk right off the smug bastard’s face, he could remember to feel nothing but anger.

“I’m bored, Ken,” Schuldig said. “Entertain me.”

Ken kicked him. Sorry, buddy. I’m not playing either…

But it’s not enough. Schuldig stumbled backward – it’s not enough, God damn it! – he winced, he hissed an angry, sibilant something under his breath and it didn’t even sound like he was doing it in Japanese, but when he looked up he was smiling. He was bored, he was playing, the gun was back in his hand and he was smiling, for Christ’s sake!

“Easy,” Schuldig suggested: still he smiled and his smile was gentle, considerate, wrong. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

(But you’re going to. Right?) Ken heard himself laugh; there was nothing else to do. Jesus fuck, Schuldig was talking to an animal. To a cornered creature, all fear and fury, that wanted to bite or flee or both…

“Go to Hell, Schwarz!” How stupid do you think I am?  
“You know,” Schuldig said mildly, “we could do this the easy way…”  
Don’t, in other words, fight it – whatever it is. Roll over and play dead, there’s a good boy. “You’re out of your goddamn mind.”  
“Hey. Your move, kid…”

Damn straight it’s my move!

 _There_. There’s the gun, there’s the door, there’s the Schwarz still figuring himself safe enough to play: he’s gambled on worse odds and do you really think you’re gonna get a better opening than this? It’s no kind of plan but it could be, if the pieces fall just so. Maybe I wanna hurt you, you bastard. You ever consider that?

Again Ken stopped thinking; unthinking; he sprang. Caught Schuldig about the midsection, knocking the air from his lungs, bowling him off his feet and even if it hadn’t worked last time then maybe, just maybe, if the pieces fell _just so_ …

Schuldig dropped, collapsing on the tiles in a heavy and ungraceful sprawl; Ken landed on top of him, jarred and dazed and clawing at Schuldig’s wrists as he snatched for the gun. Schuldig spat a curse, something harsh and consonant-choked that Ken didn’t have to understand to comprehend only too well, and the boy felt himself start to smile. There was the gun, there was the door, there was Schuldig, tense and angry and trapped beneath him and for a moment, a single beautiful moment, it all seemed like it might be possible after all—

(it’s not enough)

—then, sudden and shocking, there was the pain.

Game over. He always pushed things too far. If he had just been whole and unbleeding, or if his hands had been free, it would have been easy. An elbow to the throat, a knee to the diaphragm and the gun right there for the taking – but Ken never, never did things the easy way. He lunged desperately for the gun, his fingers grazed smooth metal, the skin of Schuldig’s hands: then pain came. Pain lanced through his arm, his shoulder as, blinded and gasping, Ken fell back against Schuldig’s chest, hands going, almost instinctively, to the wound. Oh God, oh Jesus Christ _I don’t have time for this!_ Fuck. _Fuck_ , what the Hell just happened?

Gritting his teeth and dragging open his eyes, Ken pushed himself back up, breathing, already, too hard and too fast. Schuldig’s chest, Schuldig’s shoulder, acres and acres of cold white tile, gleaming moistly under the strip light. Gun. Where the Hell was the goddamn—

Agony. Pain burst behind Ken’s eyes, and everything went black.

Oh. There’s the gun. He fell, rolling off Schuldig and landing heavily on his back. Fade out, then cut back to the same one second later: Ken opened his eyes on nothing but white, and closed them again against the pounding in his head. The light hurt. Idiot! Blew that one but good, didn’t you? Christ, Hidaka (and anger was easy, anger was familiar and safe, if he thought only about how angry he was then maybe he could forget to be—) fucking Hell, you’re a goddamn moron!

“True,” Schuldig said from a million miles distant, “but at least you’re an amusing one. Nice try, though.” The worst thing about it was he didn’t even sound mad.

And Schuldig was on him, holding him pinned with his own body weight; one heavy hand pressed down hard against his chest, just above his heart – and, just in case he was thinking about protesting, the cool metal muzzle of the gun grazed gently beneath his chin. Don’t touch me, asshole: Ken felt himself tense. Lie still and take it, then, whatever it was.

(Stay angry, God damn it. Stay angry.) No. That couldn’t be it. There had to be something he could do…

“Kid,” Schuldig said, “you’ve done quite enough. My turn.”  
“Fuck off,” Ken spat. _Let me go.  
_ Schuldig smiled at him. “No, I don’t think I will.”

Something. Anything. Damn the gun, there had to be! He twisted beneath Schuldig’s weight. Spat a curse (don’t touch me) fighting to buck the bastard off: Schuldig laughed like this was some kind of game, like this was even better than he had expected, leaning forward to lie flat on his chest. It wasn’t the gun as much as the thought of what this must have looked like – good Christ, the guy’s on top of him! – that had Ken stilling. Muscles taut, teeth gritted, he glared up at Schuldig through a fall of his own tangled hair. For Christ’s sake, you prick, will you just make a fucking mistake! Just one. Please! I don’t need anything more—

Sure. Keep telling yourself that. We already tried that and what good did it do? The game’s over. He’s got you right where he wants you and now he’s gonna make you pay. He’s going to hurt you, Ken, and there’s nothing you can do.

No. That couldn’t be right. “Jesus Christ! What do you _want_ from me?”  
And Schuldig said, “Everything. Everything you have.”

Jesus fuck. You mean he’s just going to… again Ken stared at him, eyes owl-wide; he heard himself catch his breath and you’re playing right into his hands, you moron, when you shouldn’t be playing at all! No. No, Ken told himself, that couldn’t be it. Why the Hell would they go to all this trouble, for nothing but a straight kill?

Everything, he said: what else could that mean? I’m an assassin, a dead man walking. There’s nothing else left.

“That doesn’t make sense.”  
Schuldig simply laughed, and his laughter came hot and ticklish against Ken’s neck. _God_ — Schuldig’s hair was brushing against his throat, and it was sickening. “Doesn’t it?” he asked (his voice was soft, almost intimate; he could have been whispering to a lover). “We aren’t all murderers here, kiddo. You’d be amazed how much you’ve still got left to lose.” He ran one slender finger down the side of Ken’s cheek, and Ken flinched.  
“Get off!”

And he shoved at one of Schuldig’s shoulders (don’t _touch_ me, God damn it!) and it hurt, it left him gasping and it did no good. Couldn’t get the angle right, didn’t have the leverage: Schuldig didn’t even seem to feel it and oh God it hurt. Pain shot down his arm, Ken set his teeth against it; a sudden gout of blood flooded into the bandage about his shoulder. Fuck, oh fuck, what the Hell did I just— and Schuldig tapped him gently under the chin with the barrel of the gun. Aren’t you forgetting something?

Ken froze; he closed his eyes, struggled to control his breathing. The tiles were cold against his back. How long, he wondered, would it hurt for?

“That,” Schuldig said simply, “depends entirely on whether or not you die. You’d be amazed what you can live through, too. If you could call it living.” He added: “Don’t move.”

You got it.

Stay angry. His eyes screwed shut, his entire body tense, Ken realized he was shaking. You’re frightened, he thought. Jesus fuck. You’re _scared_. Please God say Schuldig hadn’t noticed too… the redhead drew back, just slightly; his hair dragged against Ken’s cheek, his free hand – what the Hell is he doing? – drifting slow and ticklish and disgustingly intimate down the side of his body, coming to rest on the waistband of his jeans. Mary Mother of God—

“Christ,” he whispered, and his voice sounded strange. “What are you doing?”  
“I said don’t move.”

His shirt’s been pushed up, just a little: Ken hadn’t really noticed it until Schuldig’s hand found the bare flesh of his stomach and he felt himself recoil, but there was nowhere to go, nothing to do but lie there and let him. He’s got a gun. For a moment the man’s fingers simply rested there, his skin too cold and his touch too firm before Schuldig, smiling, shifted slightly. His knee slipped between Ken’s thighs, pushing them apart and pressing hard against him; _all he wants is everything_ and, eyes flying open, Ken heard himself gasp.

“Stop.”

Jesus fuck. I’d rather he killed me.

Oh, yeah? Think he cares what you want? It’s a game, Ken told himself frantically, he’s trying to freak you out. It’s a game, it’s all a game, he doesn’t mean it, there’s no way he can mean it. We’re men. We’re both _men_. He won’t go through with it, Goddamn it he can’t! Hope, fragile and forlorn: he clung to it desperately, and then he couldn’t even manage that. Schuldig forced his hand beneath the waistband of Ken’s pants, snatched at him through the thin fabric of his underwear. Oh, my God—!

This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.

“Stop it!”  
“I don’t want to.” What are you gonna do about it, Ken?

Help me. The barrel of the gun pressed hard against his chin, hard enough to hurt as Schuldig – don’t move – flicked open his jeans, snatching at the waistband and stripping them roughly from him, dragging them down his hips, his thighs, dragging his boxers down with them. God help me… The blood rushed to his cheeks, tears prickled at the corners of his eyes; his jeans and his underwear caught on one ankle, the cold raised gooseflesh on Ken’s calves, his thighs. This couldn’t be happening. He’s half-naked and so frightened he feels quite sick with it, and desperately, desperately ashamed: this couldn’t be real. Things like this didn’t happen. Not to people like him, not now, not here!

He fought it when Schuldig tugged his tee-shirt up, leaving it bunched beneath his raised arms; another nudge from the muzzle of the gun and he stilled. For a long moment Schuldig simply gazed at him and, flushing to the roots of his hair, Ken turned away. At least he could still hide his face. This isn’t happening _…_

“That’s better.”

It’s cold.

It was cold, and this was real. Don’t move: wide-eyed and horrified, stripped Adam-naked with a gun to his throat, Ken simply lay there as Schuldig pinned his cuffed hands above his head. This was real. God, this was real. He was alone and he was trapped, and he was utterly, utterly helpless.

“You know,” Schuldig said, “what I’m going to do to you.”  
“Don’t,” Ken whispered. There were no other words.  
“Say please.” There was his hair again, falling soft and ticklish against Ken’s cheek, there was his breath, hot and moist at his ear. He smelled. Smelled of cigarettes and heavy cologne, of butter left too long out the fridge. “Maybe I’ll consider it, if you ask nicely.”  
No you won’t. Go to Hell, Schuldig… Ken squeezed his eyes shut, he shivered. Hating himself for it, he said, “Please.”

And, smiling, Schuldig raped him.

Instinctively, he struggled when Schuldig bent to him. He’s going to hurt you— Ken was trapped and he was terrified, he couldn’t believe in a word of it. This couldn’t be happening, there had to be something he could do! He tensed, he tried and tried desperately to fight free from under him and it made no difference, it did no good. Schuldig held him down and forced himself inside him; pain caught Ken by surprise, and it was pain that had him screaming.

Humiliation he’d expected. He hadn’t expected the pain. Oh Christ, oh Christ _this wasn’t happening_ : it hurt. It hurt like nothing on earth. Stop it. Stop it. You’re _hurting_ me, Goddamn it, make it stop! Tears sprang to his eyes – now open wide, now screwed tightly shut with agony flaring red behind his lids – and Ken shrieked again, the scream breaking on a tortured gasp as Schuldig tore him apart. It hurt so bad he could hardly breathe, could barely even remember why he was hurting, his thoughts ( _this isn’t happening_ ) running in hopeless, hysterical spirals ( _this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening it can’t be it hurts get_ off _me you bastard I want my mother make it stop, please God make it stop it hurts stop hurting me this isn’t—_ ) as he twisted beneath the body that pinned him down, fought to make sense of what was happening to him, to find some way to block it out, and failed wretchedly at all of it…

(For God’s sake, somebody, help me!)

Obscenely, horrifically, he thought of Yuriko. Schuldig’s lips at his throat, Schuldig’s breath coming heated against his cheek, Ken thought of Yuriko’s hands, her fingers, her uneven, unpainted nails. He screamed, in pain and in anguish and in simple outrage; he hated Schuldig but he hated himself more. No wonder the bastard was grinning.

He knew it was over when Schuldig pushed him away, scrambling back to his feet and scrupulously re-adjusting his disordered clothing. Exhausted, nauseated, aching all over, Ken lay on his back and stared emptily up at the ceiling, struggling to catch his breath. He wondered if he was going to be sick. Schuldig was smoothing out his crumpled shirt, patting down his pockets, lighting a languid cigarette and surveying him coolly down the length of his nose, the gun hanging loose in one hand. He could have just reached up and taken it…

Ken’s cheeks were wet, and he realized he was crying. Now will you kill me, Schuldig?

No. No, of course he wouldn’t. Schuldig simply laughed, shaking his head. “God,” he said, “all that fuss and you weren't worth the effort it took to get your pants off.”

Oh, Jesus fuck— And hard contempt in the redhead’s narrow eyes.

Mama’s boy. You’re still crying, crying like a woman or a kid… Stung back into awareness, Ken forced himself to sit, wiping furiously at his eyes as he struggled – his hands were shaking, why the Hell were his hands shaking? – to tug his shirt back down, and then wiping them again, slumping heavily against the wall. Bastard. Fucking asshole _bastard_. Oh, God. God, it hurt, he was going to throw up and good Christ will you stop fucking crying you pathetic goddamn—

(Why me?)

So Schuldig helped him. Ken tensed when he crouched by his side, flinching and turning away as Schuldig reached for his jeans and helped him to dress. The boy didn’t speak, didn’t try to push him away or try to stop him: why the fuck bother? There was nothing left to fight for, anyway. It was only when Schuldig patted him on the cheek that Ken surged suddenly and angrily to life, recoiling violently from the touch and aiming a wild and desperate swing at jaw or chest or any damn thing at all – pain left him weak and despairing, pain and the cuffs held him fast. The blow went wild, and Schuldig wasn’t even there.

That finished him off. Nothing left to call on or even try to salvage, Ken collapsed back against the wall, head tipped back, his gaze unfocused: he didn’t try to move again, even to dash the tears from his eyes. Why you, Hidaka? Look at how you wound up here, the road you had to travel to fetch up in this ridiculous goddamn mess in the first place and ask yourself, why the Hell not?

You were there. Now tell me you didn’t deserve it. Schuldig hesitated by the open door, one hand resting on the frame; he glanced back at him over one shoulder, through a fall of fiery hair. Christ, if only the bastard would stop smiling…

“Nothing personal, Ken.”

The door slammed shut behind him.

____  
  


Sakura Tomoe had cut her hair again, she was back in hooded tops and training shoes; she was looking herself. I was just in the area, she had told them, and Mother said she wanted flowers, so I thought… She might, Omi thought, even have been telling the truth. Even then she very nearly hadn’t come in until he had called out to her, and asked her if she wanted a drink.

Flowers. Aya had helped her with that, suggesting an autumn arrangement and charging her slightly less than half the ticket price for the privilege – and Moth, dressed up as if for a date in a pastel-striped sweater and a little white skirt, gazed at Sakura all the while from behind the dahlias she was holding, her eyes full of desperate jealousy. Studying the way Aya’s gaze softened as it lit upon the girl, studying the slight smile that came to the redhead’s pale lips as Sakura, warming her hands on the mug of tea Omi had fetched for her, sat and watched him preparing her bouquet, her feet crossed at the ankles and neatly tucked beneath her chair.

“Oh, Omi-san – are your friends all right?”

But it was Omi Sakura talked to, it was Omi she asked about the others.

“My friends?”

Sakura nodded. “Mm. Youji-san and Ken-san. Nene-chan said they weren’t here yesterday either, but I didn’t think… They’re both all right, aren’t they, Omi-san?” And she smiled, as if she knew it was foolish to worry, but she’d promised the other girl she’d mention it.  
She knew too much, that was the problem. Omi smiled, he took a sip of his own tea. He said, “They’re fine.”

Fine. Omi was a good liar but, as the girl gave him a clumsy, grateful grin, relief showing plain in her eyes, knowing that she had believed him was no consolation at all. Not while Youji lay upstairs, battered and dazed and weary, his ankle taped and splinted and one arm thrown across his eyes to protect them from the sun; not when Ken—

I’m scared, papa.

God, it was hard not to think about Ken. He was alive, he had to be, if they’d wanted to kill him they’d have done it on the spot and knowing that was no kind of comfort at all when all that meant was alive for now. They – whoever they were, Schwarz or Verwandlung or both – they thought he might be useful, which would keep Ken whole for just as long as it took for them to learn they’d get nothing from him. They didn’t have time for this, for girls and flower shops and smiling deceit! His friend was out there somewhere, perhaps restrained, perhaps cold or hungry, or hurting or ill: the one thing Omi knew for sure? Wherever Ken was, whatever was happening to him he would be alone, and he would be frightened.

We are going to find him, aren’t we, Aya-kun?

“Just away?”  
Omi nodded. “Just away, Sakura-san. Youji-kun’s been busy, and Ken-kun’s seeing his family. They’ll be back soon.”

The smile felt wrong on his face. Omi was a good liar, he always had been, but he couldn’t lie to himself. It must have been nice to believe it – but what else could he ever have said? It’s nothing to worry about, Sakura-san, it’s just that Schuldig’s back?

“Oh,” Sakura said, flat and simple. “It’s a shame I missed them, it would have been nice to see you all… well, if Ken-san calls, will you tell him I said hello? And can you tell Youji-san, too?”  
“Of course, Sakura-san. I’ll let them both know.” 

Now pretend you can tell Ken anything of the sort. Omi sighed, he looked away, hoping against hope that his eyes hadn’t betrayed him anyway. The shop bell chimed pointlessly to itself as the door swung open: a customer. At least it would give him something else to think about. Murmuring an apology to Sakura – no, no, Omi-san, I won’t keep you – he set down his cup and climbed quickly to his feet, a bright shopkeeper’s smile on his lips as he turned to the door, to the girl stepping around a young mother with a stroller, accepting the woman’s apology with a cheerful nod—

 _Komachi_. Oh, no.

(And a gasp, a sudden flurry of confused motion: Moth wasn’t watching them any more.)

She looked prim, did Komachi. She looked neat and pretty and delicate and safe: her fingers laced behind her back, a flamboyant red bow in her dark curls, she stood before the display cases, gazing admiringly at a bowlful of lilies and roses, rather fussily arranged. One of Aya’s bouquets, placed there only that morning – fall colors, he’d said. What on earth was she doing here?!

Every instinct Omi possessed was demanding he hustle Sakura out of the door and out of danger, shout a warning to Aya as he snatched for a knife or a sharp pair of scissors. Oh, he knew what the game was – it is a game, Tsukiyono, to her – and to Hell with the consequences, everything he had was screaming that he should give the girl exactly what she’d come for. He wanted to run to the girl, slam her bodily against the cabinets and let her know just how badly she had messed up by coming here, now: where’s Ken-kun, Komachi, what have you done to him?

But Sakura was sat at the table, watching him watch Komachi with wide, anxious eyes; the young mother swung her pushchair toward Aya and the counter, and Nene and Miyuki giggled behind their hands. Maybe the best thing he could do was get…

Komachi raised her head, met his eyes, and if he’d been thinking of ducking back into the stockroom and waiting the girl out, that look ended them all. She smiled, and her smile was the twin of his own, bright and brittle and false. “Good afternoon, Mr. Shopkeeper,” she said. “I’m looking for an arrangement. Do you think you can help?”

She’s a customer. She’s just another customer. Whatever she says, whatever she does, you can’t let on she’s anything more than that, for everyone’s sake… He wiped his hands on his apron, taking the opportunity to slip the scissors into his pocket; he crossed over to the cabinets, stopping short a few careful feet from Komachi’s side – but if you can’t do anything without blowing your cover, she can’t either. Remember that, Omi.

“Well… I suppose so,” Omi said, because he had to say something: something civil, something normal, she’s just another customer. “Are you looking for anything in particular?”  
Komachi giggled, she ducked her head: oh good, Mr. Shopkeeper, I _was_ hoping you’d join in. “Oh,” she said, “nothing special, really. I was rather hoping you’d have some ideas. I told you I’m not very good with flowers.”  
“Of course, but… I’d still need some idea what you were looking for.”  
“What do you mean?”  
“Well… I don’t suppose you could tell me why you’re buying them?” Cautious as a cat on the prowl, Omi drew a step nearer to the cabinets, to her: the scissors swung against his leg as he moved, a heavy and comforting weight. “I don’t want to pry, but it would really help if I knew… I mean, these are pretty expensive. They’re for special occasions. If you just want something to brighten a room…?”  
“That’s true,” Komachi said, and now she was playing at thoughtfulness. “Mama won’t be happy if I spend too much. They’re just for the guest room.”  
“The… guest room?”  
“Mm.” The girl nodded: she couldn’t quite keep the malicious edge from creeping into her smile. “We’ve a visitor. An unexpected visitor. And – and do you know something, Mr. Shopkeeper? I really don’t think he feels at home.”

Omi closed his eyes; the breath caught in his throat. A small, dark room, the stale air hanging heavy with cigarette smoke, a child cowering by the wall, aching with cold and hunger and too terrified even to think. Too bad, kid… Ken would be hurt, and afraid, and alone: restrained or not, he would know himself trapped. Would believe, perhaps, that he had been forgotten. _I’m scared_ …

(What have you done to him? Give him back!)

“I know what you’re thinking,” Komachi murmured: Omi sincerely doubted it. How, oh how, could anything about this woman have reminded him of Ouka, even for a second? “You know exactly who I’m talking about, don’t you? Don’t worry, Mr. Shopkeeper, we haven’t broken him yet…”  
“Can I help you?”

 _Aya_.

And like a savior, like a miracle, Aya was there. A heavy hand resting on Omi’s shoulder, the familiar, reassuring weight of his teammate’s presence by his side: Omi felt himself relax. _Thank you, Aya-kun_ … Komachi stepped away. The smile was gone as she glared up at Aya, eyes narrowing, body going tense. Two to one and on enemy ground, she’d got the message all right.

“Miss,” Aya said, low and definite, “I think you’d better leave.”  
Komachi forced a laugh, she tossed her head. “So,” she said, “no flowers then. How will our guest survive.”  
“He’s strong. He’ll manage. You’re bothering us. Go.” 

Komachi went. Tossing her head, casting a haughty look back over one shoulder as she swept out of the door and – Omi winced – slammed it shut behind her. Looked like games, for Komachi, were only fun if you won.

“Is she your friend, Omi-san?” Sakura sighed wistfully, fidgeting with the drawstrings of her sweater. “She’s really pretty.”  
“Not exactly, Sakura-san. I wouldn’t say we were friends.”  
Sakura frowned – but, before she could speak, the sound of the stockroom door creaking open had her starting in surprise. “Omi-san, is someone—”  
“Has she gone?”

The storeroom door creaked open as Moth stepped cautiously back out, her wide green eyes darting about the shop quick and anxious as dragonflies zig-zagging over water. The girl moved like prey, flitting from the stockroom to the shop table where she stood worrying at her lip, fingers working anxiously at the strap of her shoulder bag. As if she might think better of it, as if any minute she might turn tail and dart right back…

“Moth-san? You were out the back?”  
“That,” Aya said quietly, “is a staff area.”  
Moth colored, her gaze dropping to her hands. “I… I’m sorry, Aya-san,” she said. “I didn’t touch anything, I promise. I just had to… I mean I knowI shouldn’t have gone in there, but—” She broke off, she looked away. She looked like she wanted to bolt.  
But? “Is everything all right, Moth-san?”  
“Fine!” she said – but she said it too fast, and from the look on her face she knew it. “It’s fine,” she said again, as if she hoped that repeating herself might make it sound more convincing. “It’s just… I’m sorry. I’ve got to get home.”

And Moth turned and she fled, her still-unwrapped dahlias lying forgotten on the tabletop.

____  
  
  
The kid had been crying. Bit disappointing, that. He had looked frightened and ill and all of fifteen years old and there Winters had hoped for… for something different, something more. A sign, perhaps. Some kind of suggestion – and damn the four shallow slashes scored across his chest, the bone-deep bruise maculating his calf: damn knowing the kid must have been trying to kill him – that this wasn't just another idiot teenager in way too deep, that bringing him here hadn't been a mistake. He'd raised his head when the door was opened, he shied away and tried to kick when the Mick and his carrot-topped friend had dragged him to his feet, and there was something in his red-rimmed eyes—

Up close and in the light, he didn't look like much. Just another dark-haired, dark-eyed teenager in a city full of them, drab and uninteresting as a pigeon in Trafalgar Square: the kind of kid a man passed in the streets or stood by on the subway and didn't spare so much as a second glance for. The bruises were the only interesting things about him.

He should have broken easily. He looked like he’d broken already…

But David Winters had lived quite long enough to learn to mistrust appearances.

His hair was plastered close to his skull, running water into closed eyes; his tee-shirt clung with disgusting intimacy to the contours of his chest and he was a skinny little bastard, without the jacket; coughing weakly, the boy sat slumped against the side of the bathtub, head bowed, his shoulders heaving as he struggled to catch his breath. The redhead, a cigarette clamped tight between too-white, too-even teeth, gave his moon-pale partner a face-splitting grin, and muttered something about drowning cats, and chuckled under his breath. The Mick didn’t even bother smiling.

They should never have had to push this hard, this far, a couple of good punches should have more than done the job – but the boy had pushed back, and there’d been nothing else to do but increase the pressure.

“I did tell you,” Winters said, wiping his dripping hands on the legs of his pants, “we could find a simple way.” Then, in English, "Was any of that important?"  
"Not really," the American said. "Just another anatomical impossibility."

And that had led them here – the kid up to his waist in water and handcuffed to one of the grab bars, _you were there for the Doctor, weren’t you?_ – and it wasn’t working either.

The attraction of the bathroom had been that the door locked, and the sloping, tiled floor could be hosed clean. The large central tub, or so the theory had run, would be good for nothing but getting in the way. Now Winters sat heavily down on the edge of the bath, and ran one damp hand across his broad face, and sighed. Forty minutes they’d been at this and all he had to show for it were sore knuckles and a wet shirtfront. Bloody hell, what in the world were they dealing with here? Christ, the stubborn little bastard.

“So,” he said to the American – Yamanouchi’s Crawford, and Heaven only knew what she’d seen in the man when he was as personable as a fence post and let his men run riot, “remind me again. What _do_ we know about this kid?”  
The Kraut got in first. “Kitty-cat codename,” he said. “Crap lay.” He laughed again, again, nobody joined in. The boy, flinching, pressed himself closer into the corner of the bath; Crawford simply looked aggrieved.  
“Yes, thank you, Schuldig, we’re all aware you can’t keep it in your pants. Unfortunately,” Crawford gave a rather theatrical sigh, “leaving aside the results of Schuldig’s exertions and the fact that this kid and his companions have proved a rather persistent thorn in our side, your guess is as good as mine.”  
“Wonderful,” Winters said. “Now he tells us. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you tell the President that you’d dealt with this shower before?”  
Crawford’s lips quirked slightly; in him, perhaps, that passed for a smile. “I believe you dealt with the Irish. The comparison is exact, Mr. Winters, entirely exact.”  
“Well, where does that get us? I can’t turn around and ask this boy if it’s true he’s a bloody awful shag, if you’ll pardon my saying so. The President wants answers, for God’s sake – and unlike your companions over there, Mr. Crawford, I’m not actually in this for the good of my health!”  
Now Crawford truly did smile. Winters could hardly own it any kind of improvement. “Then how about you demonstrate how a professional gets results? I’m sure they’d welcome a little on-the-job training.”

They’d do far better with a bit of discipline and a firm hand. Winters got to his feet, he twisted his fingers in the boy’s wet hair, roughly yanking back his head. His eyes were tightly closed, a new bruise blooming on one cheek, a soft, pained sound escaped his throat, and he didn’t look any more inclined to remember how his tongue worked than he had five minutes ago – but that had been before that Yank bastard had made this a matter of pride. Probably best, when dealing with a kid who seemed quite convinced his name was Fuck You, to keep the questions simple.

“Okay, son,” Winters said, switching, for the kid’s sake, back to Japanese. “Let’s start again. Now. Who do you work for, please?”

The boy said nothing. He didn’t so much as open his eyes.

Very well then. Deep breath—

And forced his head back under the water. The kid twisted desperately beneath Winters’s grasp, thrashing and kicking out at nothing at all: Winters looked down at his watch. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. Thirty… bubbles on the surface of the churning water, water soaking into his shirt as his rolled-up sleeve – oh, bloody hell! – slipped down his arm. Forty seconds, fifty. A click, a long exhalation, the scent of tobacco as the German lit and drew on his fourth or fifth or sixth cigarette; the boy wasn’t fighting so hard any more. A minute. One ten…

At one minute twenty Winters dragged the kid back up, heard him take a single convulsive gasp – then forced him back beneath the water again.

You know, son, we could just talk about this.

Forty-eight seconds down and the door swung open, and a man and a woman let themselves in. There was the _tick_ of her heels, the creak of the hinges, the sound of their voices – hers clipped and commanding, then his, quieter and deferential. _Hai, shachou, mochiron sansei desu_ … Winters raised his head, he straightened, stepping away from the bath. At least she wouldn’t expect him to salute.

“Mr. Winters,” Shun Yamanouchi said, in faultless, Boston-accented English. “Good evening.”  
“President Yamanouchi. What a pleasant surprise.”

She was at least pleasant to look at, though there wasn’t much to be done about the small breasts, the too-thin face, the sharp, acquisitive look in her eyes. She was a woman of planes and lines, she wasn’t soft enough to be beautiful. But her bobbed hair was glossy and red, her waist narrow, her legs long and surprisingly shapely, and if it wasn’t exactly a delight to be pushed round and dressed down by a female she was easy enough on the eye that it helped to cushion the blow. Winters watched her legs as she strode across the room, her ponce of a secretary bobbing in her wake.

(The kid, coughing, blinked the water from his eyes; he gazed up at the President in something very close to shock.)

“Yes, well.” Yamanouchi rested her hands on the edge of the sink, she leaned back against it, crossing those elegant legs at the ankle, and looked Winters straight in the eye. “I thought I’d pay a visit. See how things were shaping up down here… you were saying something about results this evening, Mr. Winters, were you not?”  
Oh, God. Yes, he had promised her results. Winters pinched the bridge of his nose, rubbing at his eyes. “Might have been over-optimistic.”  
“Over-optimistic?” Yamanouchi echoed, raising her eyebrows in mock surprise. “He’s a boy.”  
“An extremely stubborn boy. We can do this fast or we can do this right.” 

And there, Winters knew, was the rub. God. He wished the Kraut would put that fucking cigarette out, that or offer him one though he'd quit long ago. What he needed to deal with the kid was the one thing he didn’t have. He needed time, needed days or weeks of it. He needed to get used to this boy, to learn to read him, time to study all those little tells and tricks and giveaways that would let him know where to focus his questioning, when to increase the pressure and what form that persuasion should take. That would lead him straight to whatever all this infernal stubbornness was designed to hide…

He didn’t need this bloody woman leaning over him demanding results and demanding them now – and what do you mean he isn’t talking, this kid’s a citizen, someone’s bound to be looking for him!

“We don’t have time to do this right.”  
“Well, fast isn’t working,” Winters said. He looked back up, ran a hand across his close-cropped hair. “A case like this could take weeks. He’s too used to pain, you won’t get anything out of him tonight.”  
Yamanouchi pursed her lips, she pushed herself back to her feet. “We’ll see.” 

She stalked over to the tub to perch herself neatly on the side, legs crossed. She leaned to the boy, said something to him in Japanese that Winters didn’t quite catch. The kid shot her a wary glance and turned away, curling up against the side of the bath. Offering her nothing but the curve of his back, his lowered head, the damp strands of hair curling at his nape. His hands were wrapped tight around the grab bar he had been cuffed to. Winters wondered if he was crying again.

“Schuldig.” Yamanouchi snapped her fingers. “What the Hell am I paying you for?”  
The redhead blinked slowly, he straightened, stepping away from his pale companion. “No can do,” he said in his hellishly-accented English, slipping his hands into his pockets – and what in the bloody Hell did he see in this to smile about? “He’s a void.”  
“Don’t be ridiculous.”  
The young man stopped smiling. He almost looked affronted. “You think I like it any more than you do?”  
“I warned you, President Yamanouchi,” Crawford said mildly. “I did say we’d encountered them before.”  
“Well, for God’s sake, why the Hell didn’t you mention it earlier?”  
Crawford merely shrugged. “It wasn’t relevant. This one’s not exactly the brains of his outfit. It hardly seemed likely anyone would lose sleep over not knowing what he thought.”  
Yamanouchi sighed. She got back to her feet. “Well, if you can’t do it there’s nothing else to say.” Her eyes narrowed scornfully as she gazed over at Schuldig, her arms folded beneath her small breasts. “We’ll just have to find an alternative means of persuasion. Kameda—” this to the prissy little secretary, who had been staring at the handcuffed boy in appalled fascination, and now colored slightly and hurried back to her side, “—call the professor. Tell him we’re going to need… truth serum, what’s the medical name?”  
“Sodium thiopental,” Kameda said.  
“That. Yes. Tell him to give Winters as much as he needs. Tell him it’s urgent.”  
“Of course, President Yamanouchi…”  
Sodium thiopental. Of course the woman’s mind would go there and damn the fact that the kid must have been no kind of liar at all, since he wasn’t even trying to lie to them. All this noise about results, bloody results and he should never have needed the drug at all, not when all he needed to get them was a fraction of the time she routinely gave the Professor and his team. Winters cleared his throat. He said, “That’s not a sure thing, you know. ”  
“Well,” Yamanouchi said, “is this?”

And gave a single gesture with one upturned hand, a gesture that seemed to take in the entire room – the boy, soaked and silent, curled up in the corner of an icy bath; the damp patches on Winters’s shirt, clinging uncomfortably to his chest, and the puddles of water about the sides of the tub and tracked across the room; the telepath, rendered useless, slouching against the wall and smirking at nothing in particular. All adding up to nothing more than an elaborate way to waste time…

“But for now,” she added, “please continue.”

____  
  
  
It was, almost, a relief to be back. The room was still cool and cuboid as a block of ice, and about as comforting; the floor tiles were smooth and unyielding against his cheek. The air still reeked of sickness and bleach. It should have been dark but it wasn’t. It was, if nothing else, familiar; he had at least been left alone. It was going to have to do.

He hadn’t broken. He had that much to hold onto, at least. They’d screamed at him, had him beaten until he was bloodied and gasping for breath, his entire body alive with pain; they’d held his head under water until he’d thought his lungs would burst and he hadn’t given them a fucking thing. Ken hadn’t said a word, in fact, except to curse them all as twisted bastards who’d be doing the world a favor if they’d all dropped dead on the spot, and in time the foreigner had decided he was sick of the game. They, Schuldig and the other one (Ruth’s son, her murderer) had dragged him back to his make-shift cell, they’d thrown him back inside and fastened the door on him – leaving Ken washed up on the tiles, coughing and soaked to the skin and feeling, of all things, thankful.

Thankful. You’ve come a long way, Hidaka. Two days ago you just hated these people. Now they get tired of hurting you and throw you back in here to rot, and you’re just grateful they cut you that much slack…

(At least Schuldig had taken his hands off him. At least, this time, the bastard had let him be.)

Christ. How pathetic did he want to get? Ken had wanted to disdain the mattress – fuck Yamanouchi and fuck her consideration, I’ll sleep on the goddamn floor – but now, on hands and knees, he dragged himself over to it all the same, collapsing onto it and curling up onto his side. He didn’t know how long he lay there, shivering and staring at the baseboard and daring himself to pray: the sliver of sky he could see, if he raised his head, through the single narrow window had been burnished black when they’d thrown him back in here, and it was burnished black now but of course it was. Some things could only be done after dark.

He wondered where the others were. Wondered what the Hell was keeping them, why they hadn’t come to get him _out_ of here and – ahh, come off it. Dream the fuck on! Weiss didn’t do salvage missions. They killed people, that was all. Honor among thieves, sure, but who looked to a murderer for compassion?

Ken wondered what time it was, and realized he’d never know.

It seemed terribly important somehow.

It shouldn’t have mattered. It was all out the same box anyway, just another part of the same twisted game – he’d been tormented and humiliated and starved and it should have been dark and it wasn’t: of course they weren’t going to tell him what the fucking time was! – and yet it was too much to bear.

Tears lay in wait, and he fought them back – and then he thought, fatally, why bother? Hurting and frightened and more alone than he could remember being in his life, Ken let himself cry because there was nobody to care if he cried now, or nobody but him and whatever he did or didn’t do he couldn’t have hated himself more than he did already; because why the fuck shouldn’t he when he was so scared he felt sick with it, when there was no way out and nothing to hold on for? It wasn’t like he had any pride left to lose.

But what did that change? Ken cried until he ran out of tears and he was still alone at the end of it, he still didn’t know the fucking time. Oh, God, he thought: just that. Oh God, what am I going to _do_?

Because nothing wasn’t good enough, it was no answer at all. No wonder they hadn’t given him a blanket…

Christ! What in the ever-living fuck was wrong with him? Two days he’d been stuck here (it had been two days, right?) and already he was throwing in the towel? What the Hell, Ken thought in something very like wonder, was the matter with him? Two lousy _days_ – and Schuldig, you dense son-of-a-bitch, two days and Schuldig on your goddamn back, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that already! The twisted bastard had – he had—oh God. Oh God, oh God, oh Jesus fuck. And you call yourself a man.

He wished he were dead. He didn’t want to die. Go figure that, Hidaka, if you even think you can—

And felt something in him _give_.

Ken scrambled to his feet, he threw himself at the door. God damn it, _I don’t want to die_! Head down, shoulders braced against the impact: the fucking thing didn’t yield an inch, not a single goddamn inch and all that meant was _try harder_. Pain shot through his shoulder, a smear of blood (you stupid bastard!) showed starkly red against the door and it didn’t matter, he didn’t care, he gritted his teeth and tried harder and it hurt, it hurt and it got him nowhere. He hammered at the door with palms and fists until his hands were sore and reddened, wrenched at and wrestled with the handle – get me out, for the love of God get me _out_ of here! – and that didn’t make any difference, either.

Nothing. Nothing. Face it, Ken: you’re trapped. Fingers still wrapped tightly about the handle, one side pressed hard against the door, Ken’s legs buckled beneath him and he slumped to the floor, shoulders shaking, the breath hitching in his throat. I don’t want to die, he was thinking. They’re going to kill me and nobody’s coming and I don’t want to die…

But what the Hell could he do about any of it? He couldn’t run, he couldn’t fight, he couldn’t even begin to try and save himself. Ken was alone and he was a prisoner. He was bruised and aching and scared half to death, and nothing to cling to but his own stupid faith that maybe, just maybe there’d be a way out that wouldn’t cost him what little he still had: a single delicate thread of hope. He could sit and wait and pray – pray, as if he had any right to, hadn’t sold his soul long ago – for an exit. There it was, all he had left to him. He could hang on. He could simply hang on.

Hang on.


	9. Mitleid: Hard bargains

It wasn’t much of a building. Just eight squat glass-and-steel stories hunkering down in a not-particularly-exciting part of town, attempting, courtesy of a rounded corner profile and a dowdy, badly-aging companion, to look interesting and modern. Youji, contemplating its rain-washed nonentity from outside a bolt-hole of a bar, a tiny, wood-fronted category error stranded between beige and white office blocks, could see why Yamanouchi had wanted to move. Tugging a sheet of damp, much-folded paper from his pocket, he double-checked the address (former Tellus building, Shinbashi 4-Chome 22-4) and tried, for the benefit of the police officers buzzing about the police box next door, to look like he had every right to be there. Don’t mind me, officers, and I don’t suppose you’ve seen Ken Hidaka?

Not that Ken was going to be anywhere near here. Even Tellus had given up on the place, their one-time HQ turned over to other tenants. If their actual offices were too public to hold a prisoner then this place was simply too normal. The staff at Shiodome Emergency Veterinary Practice weren’t going to know anything about any missing dead men.

The phrase _fool’s errand_ sprang to mind.

The rain, soft and vaguely sea-smelling and so light it seemed almost to hang in the cool autumn air, was just insult to injury. Five minutes he’d been out in it and already he was ready to get back inside. Summer had very definitely gone.

He wasn’t sure if it was a desire to see the job through (old habits, after all, dying hard) that had him crossing the street and letting himself in anyway, or if it was just an excuse to get out of the rain. This wasn’t getting them any closer to finding Ken – but turning round and going back home to nurse his concussion wasn’t going to cut it, either. Almost sixty hours he’d been gone. By now, the cops would have been looking for a body.

We’ve got to find him, Omi had said, his expression curiously set—

(Because Kritiker didn’t know we were out.)

Inside – Youji, admittedly, was no expert where it came to veterinarians, but he guessed this one looked about the same as all the others out there. An overloaded pinboard vied for attention with gaudy posters and pictures of cats and dogs; display stands groaned with leashes and collars and brushes, and bags of hideously expensive food; sheaves of pamphlets were laid out on a small table, please ensure you spay or neuter your pet. God. Who’d be a housecat?

Apart from a middle-aged man in a polo shirt and his sagging, sad-looking dog – a dog whose face looked twice as large as its skull, all drooping jowls, melancholy eyes and flapping, oversized ears – the waiting room was empty save for the girl at the reception desk. Apple-cheeked and high-ponytailed, with a face that wasn’t quite pretty yet couldn’t fairly be described as plain, she was tapping industriously away at what was either some pampered puss-cat’s medical record or an e-mail to her boyfriend. She wasn’t exactly going to be hiding Ken behind the counter, was she?

She looked up. She gave him a smile that – or was it his imagination? – didn’t look strictly professional. “Can I help?”  
“Help?” Youji stalled the girl with a smile of his own. “Well, maybe you can. I…” I what? Youji reached inside his jacket for his wallet (stall her, stall her) silently cursing himself for not coming up with a story earlie—oh, wait. That’d do. “I’m conducting a survey of local businesses.”  
“Really? A _sur_ vey?” The girl blinked, opening her eyes very wide. “You don’t exactly look the type.”  
Cat’s medical record it was. “It’s true, I’m afraid. You see, Miss,” Youji said, drawing Naotaka Shirai’s business card from his wallet and presenting it to her with a flourish, “I have what is quite possibly the most tedious job in the world, and I’m here to make your day that one bit more dull.”  
The girl laughed, showing off very white, very even teeth. “Well, you can try. But I think you’ll find it difficult.”  
“Now that,” Youji said, “sounds like a challenge.”  
“Try me,” she said. Azuma, it said on her tunic. Veterinary Nurse. The look in her eyes said he could stand there and recited the phone book for all she cared. This, Youji thought, just got considerably easier.  
“Well, as you may or may not know and probably don’t care even if you do, there’s a lot of redevelopment going on round here… so my editor had the idea of doing an article on the area. What business owners think, if they’re worried about being priced out… blah blah blah, no idea who he thinks is even going to read the damn thing, but here I am.”  
“Here you are,” she echoed. “So. How can I help?”  
“Well, would you say you were worried?”  
“Me?” Miss Azuma blinked again, this time in simple confusion: remember, Youji told himself, why you’re here. “Well… not really. Doctor Hayashida deals with the landlords and they haven’t said anything about raising the rent. Some big chemical company, I think. They had the building before we moved in. I still get calls for them, sometimes, and it doesn’t matter _how_ many times I tell some of these old guys we’re a _vet_ …”

And upstairs? Not much, she said. Offices. The second and third floors were rented by a firm of patent attorneys, Asai and Yamane. None of them would be in today. Above them, a marriage broker. She’d never seen the guy. A medical journal (Obstetrics and Neonatology) had floors five to seven and none of them would be in today either with, at the very top, a company called Sunday.

“Sunday?”  
“ _Sun_ day. Don’t ask me what they do up there, but there’s usually somebody in. I guess you could talk to them.” 

Miss Azuma handed Naotaka Shirai’s card back to him, holding it poised between finger and thumb. Her nails were unpainted, her fingers short and plump; she held Youji’s gaze as he took the card, tucked it back in his pocket, giving him another smile, and this one wasn’t even remotely professional. The salaryman and the sagging dog followed him with their eyes as he left. Outside in the elevator hall, Youji took the card out again; on a hunch, he turned it over. _Kayu_ , it said in quick, untidy kanji. _You can bore me any time_. And a phone number, and a scribbled heart.

Any other day, Miss Azuma. Any day but today. Youji muttered a curse, shoved the card back into his pocket. Goddamn it, Hidaka! Dumb kid wasn’t even here and he was still royally cramping his style…

Sixty hours, Youji reminded himself. Two days and change and nothing to show for it but sore feet and wet hair, and the dawning suspicion that Ken, like Asuka, was no more than a memory. Sure the boy was an idiot and more often than not a total pain, but he was their idiot and he didn’t deserve to die for it. Damn it, Ken. You’d better be okay!

He already knew it would be pointless but Youji rode the elevator to the top floor anyway, peered in through the lobby doors at whatever it was Sunday – and Christ but that was a terrible name – got up to, but apart from a too-trendy-to-be-true young man hunched shell-backed over his keyboard and shoveling noodles from the carton into his mouth, there was nothing to see in there but the usual array of empty desks and dead PCs. It was the same story at the medical journal, and at the marriage broker’s: darkened offices, forgotten paperwork, vacant workstations, row upon row of silent computers. In the solicitor’s reception suite, Youji stopped to borrow the phone.

“Dead end,” he said, when Omi picked up. “I’m coming home.”

____  
  
  
“President Yamanouchi, Mr. Kasai from M&G Investments.”  
“Thank you, Hikaru… Two cups of coffee, if you please. Kasai-san, do take a seat.”

Kasai bowed, his briefcase tucked neatly beneath one arm; if he saw anything unusual in the silent, unremarked-upon presence of the pale child, sat curled up in an armchair, he kept it carefully to himself. Kameda slipped back out of the room, quietly closed the door behind him. 

Naoharu Kasai looked like nothing so much as a stock photo made flesh, the prototype and paradigm of the young high-flyer. Not yet forty, his face unlined and his slicked-back hair still thick and black, he was all designer briefcase and well-shined shoes, and a carefully understated dove-grey suit so elegantly tailored Shinobu could tell at a glance it would be worth more than most men’s monthly rent. He was a type, and not even an unusual one: the kind of man who was married to his job, his wife little more than a mistress, his mistress entirely non-existent. When he looked at the President he saw an opportunity. Nothing more.

That, of course, would be exactly how she preferred it. Exactly why she had chosen him.

“I must thank you, Kasai-san, for coming all this way – and on a Sunday, too. I know what it is to neglect one’s family responsibilities.”  
“Think nothing of it, President Yamanouchi.” Kasai ran both hands through his hair, settling back more comfortably into his seat. “Your proposition is… let’s call it intriguing.” 

Shinobu pinched the bridge of his nose, he rubbed at his eyes with the balls of his finger and thumb. _Focus_. There was the President, composed and millpond-calm; Kameda a level, steady thrum of irritation, too professional to let his aggravation at losing his day off show anywhere his boss might see it. Kasai—

Kasai wasn’t there at all. Kasai’s emotions were – they were clean. They were neat, they were careful and controlled and entirely workaday as their owner; they were like the President’s, they were like Kameda’s and they simply couldn’t compete right now. Not when someone here was hurting and desperately alone, so scared they felt sick with it, and Shinobu felt their fear like it was his own. Sat in a patch of autumn sunlight, gazing out across the banks of the lazy slate-colored river, all he could feel was terror, blind and unreasoning and utterly overwhelming: his palms were clammy, his throat felt tight and there was absolutely no reason for it, no reason at all!

But it’s not your fear, Shinobu. You’re fine. Focus. That’s all you need to do. Just focus…

It’s no good. He’s caught in a hurricane, torn and battered and dazed, and she wants him to count the clouds.

Kameda let himself back in, silently placing a tray burdened with a jug and a bowl and a matched pair of steaming cups, and an array of tiny biscuits that, Shinobu knew from long experience, all tasted like nothing so much as sugared cardboard, at Yamanouchi’s elbow before excusing himself again. Oblivious to the storm, the President reached for a cup and sat back in her chair, re-crossing her legs.

“Intriguing,” she said, and smiled meaninglessly. “Very well, intriguing it is. Since we both know why you’re here, let’s dispense with the pleasantries. Tellus Pharmaceuticals, Kasai-san, is in trouble.”  
“Really?” Kasai tilted his head, inquiringly; he sat forward in his chair, absently tugging at the fabric of his pants. Now Shinobu got something else to focus on. There was the man’s curiosity, there was a sudden surge of something that was almost excitement. “Do go on.”  
“Unfortunately, yes. My father’s legacy was not what it could have been.” Yamanouchi, gazing at Kasai over the rim of her coffee cup, held the man’s eyes for a moment. “This isn’t about the problems we’ve had with Andou and Charme, I’m afraid. That storm we could weather. Our problems run far deeper than that. Between accounting errors, the expiry of the Hydroproxacine patent and the TEM-1178 mess, we are dangerously overextended.”  
“TEM…”  
“1178. An experimental drug. First-line management of hypertension. Father was counting on it to make up for the Hydroproxacine loss. We’d been working on it since 1990 and, nine months ago, we conducted Phase One clinical trials through a subsidiary in Cebu City. Unfortunately,” Yamanouchi set down her coffee cup, her slender fingers resting on the rim for just a moment, “our researchers had… miscalculated. I’ll spare you the details, but the effects on humans were catastrophic. Three volunteers lost their lives. Six of the remaining eight were crippled for life. Naturally there was an outcry, and we were forced to pull out of the Philippines. We kept it out of the papers over here, of course, but the financial fallout has been significant. We are, quite simply, drastically in the red.”  
“So, where would I come in?”  
“You? You would be our knight in shining armor.”  
_What_? Kasai’s confusion was so bright, so plain, it cut clear through the tempest. “Me?” 

She had him. Curiosity alone would see to that. Yamanouchi’s eyes flickered over to Shinobu; the boy gave a small nod. Yes, this one would be just corrupt enough.

“You. I have a plan in place that will save my company and, should you choose to come onboard, make you a very wealthy man. Oh, you needn’t worry—” the sudden spike of anxiety Shinobu had detected must have shown just as plainly in the man’s face; sometime all an empath was good for was confirming what one already knew, “—I wouldn’t be asking you to jeopardize your position – or, indeed, yourself. All I ask is that you find some buyers for our stock.”  
“But your share price…” Kasai tailed off, and now the man was visibly uncomfortable, all but shifting in his seat. Of course he was. The way things stood, it would have been slightly easier to find a buyer for a bear with a headache than for Tellus stock.  
Yamanouchi smiled. “What would you say if I told you that my associates and I have come up with a plan that will triple our share price overnight?  
Kasai laughed, brief and incredulous. “If I may speak frankly, Madam President, I’d say you were crazy.”  
“Oh, come. You’re an astute man, Kasai-san. Surely you must have asked yourself why we sponsored Charme? We have a plan, and that was simply the first stage of it. We manufactured a controversy, and we artificially lowered our own share price. Once we correct that, though… a man in the know would stand to make a fortune.”  
Insider trading, in other words. He should have refused outright: Kasai, fatally, hesitated. He reached for his coffee, he downed half of it in a single convulsive gulp. “You sound pretty confident,” he managed, after a time.  
“We are entirely confident. Of course, this would take – let me call it an investor of a certain caliber. Gambling men. Men who are not averse to risk, and not overly concerned with what the neighbors would say. You must know men like that. If you were to refuse, however… well, given the frankly perilous state of Tellus’s finances, I would obviously not be in much of a position to continue my own investments with you, would I?” 

You’ve seen the carrot. Now here’s the stick.

“Speaking—” Kasai coughed into his hand. “Entirely hypothetically, President Yamanouchi, how much stock would you estimate would be needed?”  
“As much as possible,” Yamanouchi said. “You could, for instance, convince some of your… less adventurous clients into getting out now, to increase the amount of stock in your syndicate’s hands. Naturally we would take a cut when the stock matured, but you would be entitled to your usual commission and a share in the payouts, and we – that is I myself – would be willing to pay you a finder’s fee for every investor you convinced to come on board… say, ¥500,000 a head?”  
Kasai raised his eyebrows, he met the President’s eyes. “Now that,” he said, “is definitely intriguing…” 

Kasai was smiling. He was leaning forward, hands resting on the edge of the President’s desk, poised and ready to sign on the line. She had him—

Focus. He’s right there, damn you, now focus, for the love of God just _focus –_ it wasn’t good enough. Kasai’s numbed disbelief (she isn’t, she can’t be serious, five hundred thousand yen just for making a contact and giving up a name? this simply isn’t reasonable, where’s the bloody catch?) and the slight spark of the man’s giddy fear, both all but swallowed up by sheer naked greed, were no kind of a distraction at all. Shinobu screwed his eyes shut, he pressed his palms hard against his face, his fingers pressing so hard against his eyelids it almost hurt. Shut up, he was thinking. Shut up, shut up, shut up…

And that was no good, either. There was only one way this was going to end, only one way to keep this torrent of blind and desperate horror from pulling him under, too: he would have to stop it himself. Some way, somehow, he had to cut it off at the source.

____  
  
  
The one good thing about exhaustion was the way it left a body numb.

Omi had fallen asleep at the computer again; he had woken sometime just before dawn with a crick in his neck and the imprint of computer keys scored against one cheek. For a moment, as he gazed dully at his screen saver and tried to blink the sleep from his eyes, he wasn’t entirely certain where he was or what he was doing there. Difficult enough to drag himself upstairs and make himself a coffee, never mind to slip back into the measured rhythms of a standard schoolboy’s day.

Omi-kun, are you all right? You’re a little, well…  
It’s nothing, Minako-san. I was up late last night studying. Please don’t worry about me. 

Another of those days, with school a luxury that, after wasting the weekend chasing down blind alley after blind alley, he simply couldn’t afford. It had been eighty-six hours since he’d last laid eyes on Ken. _Now, the chain rule is used to differentiate composite functions_ —and Omi doodled ferociously on a piece of scrap paper, he tried not to think of his father. Hello, Mr. Shopkeeper, I’m looking for an arrangement. He should have called in, should have stayed home and kept hunting. How could he have let this happen, how could he now carry on like it hadn’t? Ken was a kid and he’d trusted him, and now he was missing and it was all Omi’s fault. That was what came of cutting out Kritiker, of daring to think that Weiss could act alone.

Andou was dead. The mission was over. It had been good enough for Persia: how could he ever have imagined that it wasn’t good enough for him?

Read pages 67 to 70. Answer problems one through eight. I’ll want that in on Wednesday, class.

With all due respect, Kotani-sensei, that’s too bad. Omi wanted his friend back and differentiation was going to have to wait. He could blow off any number of assignments for all the difference it would make two weeks down the line, but Ken couldn’t wait for him to hand in his stupid homework! Tomorrow, he told himself as he stuffed his math books back into his bag, tomorrow I’ll call in sick. Harada-san would cover for him, she’d remember he hadn’t been looking well. Ken couldn’t just have vanished. He had to be somewhere, didn’t he? He had to be alive.

English Language, Physics, Modern Japanese: Omi chewed on his pen. Papa, I’m scared. Should have gone home at lunch, Tsukiyono. It wasn’t like he was concentrating. He asked Sasaki what the Japanese assignment had been—

And then the final bell was ringing and he sprang to his feet, he bolted for the door. He had to get home.

The lights were against him, of course. Hit one red in the first hundred yards and you hit the lot. At the impatient front of a file of mid-afternoon traffic trapped outside the NHK broadcasting center, Omi steadied his motorbike and waited for the lights to change. Didn’t have time for this, didn’t have time for anything. He was overlooking something and never mind the fact that he didn’t know what. Ken was out there, he knew it. All he had to do was find the…

Oh, no. Why now?

There. Neat and prim as ever in her red-and-black uniform, Komachi Segawa was waiting at a bus stop not even fifty meters distant, head bowed over a gaudy magazine. Behind her, half-hidden by the trees, a black sedan with tinted windows was idling in the TV station’s car park, it’s engine (or was he imagining things?) quietly ticking over. It might, of course, have been nothing: the car could have been any executive’s, Komachi just another schoolgirl in a city packed with them, but he wouldn’t have bet that it meant nothing – still less have bet Ken’s life!

Not now. Simply didn’t have time for this—and the girl looked up from her prop magazine, she gazed incuriously down the road. Oh, crap…! and there was nothing else for it but to brazen it out, if he looked away now she’d know there was something up! Omi lowered his head, gazed straight ahead at nothing at all and certainly not at Komachi. He hoped like Hell the school sweater and crash helmet would go some way to anonymizing him.

She looked straight at him, but she saw nothing at all. Komachi’s eyes passed over him as if he wasn’t there.

Nothing. Omi permitted himself a sigh of relief as the girl turned back to her magazine. So she hadn’t been waiting for a boy on a bike, after all. But if it wasn’t him she was after and it certainly wasn’t a bus, then what in the world was she waiting for?

 _Lights_. No time for that, either. Omi cursed, he gunned the bike’s engine and – nothing else for it! – swung off into the car park, half-hiding the bike between a pair of trucks. It wasn’t like he had any better leads than this.

Komachi wasn’t the only one who could hide in plain sight. Threading discreetly through the knots of pedestrians, Omi slipped onto the pavement, crossed at the lights, his head up, eyes focused on nothing at all; he hesitated beneath the trees on an afterthought of a wooded island caught between the main road and a side street, pretending to fidget with the combination lock on someone else’s waiting bicycle before, cautiously, essaying another glance at the girl. Nothing. Still watching the street over the pages of her magazine. Still no sign that she’d recognized him.

Now all there was to do was to hope that whatever it was Komachi was waiting for, he’d know it when he saw it.

It was Omi who spotted Moth first. Still tall, still nervous, still hurrying along the sidewalk on his side of the road as if she expected someone to grab her any minute. On her way from an early shift at work, no doubt, headed either for the station, or (oh, crap) straight for the _Koneko_ …

Across the road, Komachi raised her head. She touched one hand to her ear – just briefly, just for a moment, before disguising it by fidgeting with her hair. Comm,Omi thought. Then: they really do want Moth!

He straightened. He started to walk just that one bit too quickly, past the bike stands and back out onto the sidewalk. Komachi was stuffing the magazine back into her satchel, hurrying for the crosswalk: the lights were against her, cars and vans and crowded buses streaming endlessly past her, stranding her on the wrong side of the street. Tokyo had just bought him some time.

“Moth-san!”

Omi ran, calling the girl’s name. Moth stopped short, her head snapping up; her eyes, for a moment, were full of nothing but fear. She knows, Omi realized. She knows that someone’s after her…

The traffic slowed, stopped. Komachi was back on the move.

“Good afternoon, Moth-san!”  
“Oh, Omi-san!” Moth sighed in relief; she managed to scare up a smile. “I didn’t see you there!”  
No. No, of course you didn’t. “Well, I don’t normally come here, but we’re out of coffee. Were you at work today?”  
“Hm? Oh, yes… I was working early today. I didn’t know you went to school round here.”  
Omi shrugged. “Well, I don’t exactly. I was just passing when I remembered the coffee. I didn’t think Youji-kun would be happy if I came home without it, so…”  
“Really? That’s really kind of you.” Moth smiled, she fidgeted with the strap of her bag, a hint of color crept into her pale cheeks. “Um, Omi-san… would Aya-san be working today? I was going to ask him—oh, no.”  
“Moth-san? What is it?” 

Komachi. Moth’s hands had frozen around her bag strap, the flush had drained from her face. Panic held her frozen as she stared fixedly over Omi’s shoulder at the approaching girl, suddenly only horribly distinctive in her red-and-black uniform. Omi followed her gaze, his own expression growing set. Here we go again.

“Good afternoon,” Komachi said, “Mr. Shopkeeper. I was wondering if I could talk to your friend.”

Moth-san? Omi turned to face the woman – she swallowed hard, her wide-set gray eyes alive, once again, with panic as they darted from this way to that in desperate search for somewhere to run to before alighting, again, on his own. _Help me, for God’s sake, please help me_ —she couldn’t find the words, couldn’t even find her voice, but the look on her face said it all clearer than words could ever have done.

Omi stepped in front of Moth, meeting Komachi’s gaze with a cool, level stare of his own. No, you’re not the only one here pretending to be nothing but normal. If it was a challenge the girl was after, she’d got one.

“I don’t think,” Omi said quietly, “she wants to talk to you.”  
“Really?” Komachi raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. “Well, that’s just too bad. Adachi-san—” Moth’s name, her real name, _Adachi_ “—and I have some unfinished business to attend to. She doesn’t need someone like you getting in the way.”  
“I can’t see why she wouldn’t. What kind of business is this, Segawa-san, if it can’t be discussed in front of a friend?”  
“It’s private. I would have thought that a man like you would appreciate the value of privacy.”  
“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Omi repeated. _Privacy_? Komachi couldn’t expose him – not here, not now – any more than he could have done the same to her. “Why do you think you can make her, Segawa-san?”  
“Stop it,” Moth managed.  
“Leave,” the girl hissed. “This has nothing to do with you.”  
“I’m making it my business. Moth-san…” Omi hesitated. He looked back at Moth, tall and pale and terrified, her slender hands pressed tight against her mouth. “Moth-san is our friend.”  
Komachi simply smiled, but her smile had no business on a schoolgirl’s face. “But she’s not your only friend,” she said. “Is she, Mr. Shopkeeper? She’s not the only person you should be worrying about right now. Or don’t you care about him anymore?”

 _Ken_.

Omi flinched, as if the girl had reached out and slapped him. Ken was still alive—

“ _Leave me alone_!”

Moth, her voice high and thin and terrified. She screamed it: heads turned; a passing couple stopped in their tracks; a group of floppy-socked high-school girls stood giggling by the bike racks turned and gawped shamelessly; a man in a business suit shot them all a disapproving look. Quite in spite of himself Omi cringed, giving the man a defensive smile. Never mind the situation, never mind the sudden, horrible little start that Komachi’s words had given him, this… well, it probably did look kind of bad.

The couple whispered and fidgeted. Business suit stepped forward. “Is everything all right?”  
Omi swallowed. He turned to the man. Ken-kun, I’m sorry, but there’s more at stake here than you know. “This girl is bothering us.”  
“She is?” Confused, the man gazed between them: the wide-eyed young woman cowering behind the back of a little blonde schoolboy; the pretty high-schooler, all tumbled hair and school plaid, glowering and backing off a defensive pace or two. A frown crossed his face and made itself at home there. “What’s this all about?”

Game over, Omi thought. He’d won, or won for now. Whatever Verwandlung had wanted from Moth, Komachi clearly couldn’t snatch it – it, or her – in the middle of a crowded street, and with half the city to watch her. That only left why she had wanted to, and what it might mean that she’d failed…

“This isn’t over, Weiss,” she hissed. And ran.

____  
  
  
Sometimes, Yamanouchi wondered if Komachi Segawa was more trouble than she was worth. An asset she was and a valuable one at that, never mind the time and expense it had taken to secure her – and yet she was still a girl, and that was both a blessing and a curse. For all her easy confidence, her belief in her own invulnerability, she was volatile and self-centered, her pride too easily wounded; she still possessed a child’s casual cruelty, still believed the world should be essentially fair.

Komachi did not suffer slights gladly.

“This isn’t my fault, President Yamanouchi!”

It was merely a mercy she hadn’t been with a client, or one of the board. Twenty to five on a slow Monday afternoon and Yamanouchi had been catching up on her e-mails, smoking a casual cigarette when there’d been a commotion in the outer office (hurrying footsteps, a sharp _thud_ as Hikaru’s chair stuck the wall, _Miss, you can’t go in there—!_ ) and the girl had burst, ready or not, into the room with Nakayama, silent and dour as ever, hard on her heels. It wasn’t even worth trying to have her removed.

One job. One simple job: find the sample and bring her back – and all she’d got to show for it was a raging Komachi and half a handful of excuses. Lord. Never send a child to do a man’s work.

Leaning forward, Yamanouchi stabbed one manicured finger down on the intercom on her desk. “Hikaru, cancel my five o’clock. Now, Komachi.” Settling back in her chair, she took a calming drag on her cigarette and exhaled in a sigh. “Dare I ask why you’re interrupting me at work?”

It wasn’t her fault. She had to believe her. Komachi had run into the Professor’s missing sample on Sunday, she’d got the Schwarz boy to track her down, and she’d have brought the sample back, too, if only the Weiss brat she’d tangled with the night they’d taken the other one hadn’t butted in. All that stupid kid had to do was to keep his nose out of it, and it would all have been fine…

“They’ve taken something from us,” Komachi said. “Why shouldn’t we return the favor?”  
An eye for an eye, then, and all she was really saying was _it’s not fair_. Yamanouchi sighed. She drummed her nails on her blotter. “Very well. Let me see if I’ve understood you correctly. You wish Verwandlung to cede an advantage, for no more reason than to make a point to an enemy who won’t even be present to witness it.”  
Komachi bristled visibly. “They’ve brought it on themselves! They got in the way!”  
“The boy’s no use to us dead, Segawa.”  
“He’s not much use alive, either,” the girl retorted. “Why are you keeping him around, anyway? So Winters can amuse himself? Pretend he’s still got it?”  
“Because he is valuable. Certainly far too valuable a piece to sacrifice simply to assuage your temper. Your methods are unsubtle, Segawa. You may wish to remember that when you reflect on the reasons for your failure today.”  
“But I didn’t fail, President Yamanouchi! That kid—”  
“That _kid_ ,” Yamanouchi said with too much patience, “outsmarted you. A public approach requires subtlety. Thanks to you and the scene you made, the sample now knows we’re on her tail. She knows that we’ll be able to find her again if we try. She’s simply going to go to ground. No, if we’re going to get anywhere with these boys – and with the sample, for that matter – we’re going to have to try another approach.” 

For in one regard Komachi was only entirely right: for all Winters’s efforts to get him to talk, the boy in the basement was proving quite tiresomely obstinate. But, even if he never spoke another word, there were different ways for Hidaka to prove of value. So his little friends were protecting the sample, were they? Well, Yamanouchi thought, we’ll see how long _that_ lasts.

“Hikaru?” She essayed another jab at the intercom. “Call Mister Crawford in Sagamihara. I have a job for him. Oh, and could you leave a message for Professor Gersten? Tell him… Tell him he’ll have his sample by noon tomorrow.” And she smiled into the receiver. When it came to Gersten’s needs, one liver was much the same as another.

____  
  
  
“Smile.”

Fuck you, Schuldig—

And the flash burst in his face, once twice three times, and Ken felt himself flinch.

There’s a gun at his head and a man’s thick fingers twisted in his hair. There’s a newspaper in his lap, the evening _Yomiuri_. His left eye’s swollen closed. His shoulder’s killing him. He can’t remember the last time he ate. It’s Monday.

Monday. Four days, then, and Ken hardly knew if he was surprised or not. He didn’t think he’d been here that long, wherever the Hell here was; it was already getting difficult to believe he’d ever be anywhere else. Good thing, too, now that the terms had changed. Ken guessed he knew why. He guessed he’d made such a fucking awful prisoner he was worth more as a hostage. God knew what they were hoping to trade, God knew what his team (and it had to be Weiss they were after; who else would have given even half a shit about what happened to him now?) had found that these bastards were so keen to get their hands on.

Either way it was a rotten goddamn deal. Ken could have told them that Weiss wouldn’t go for it and they were wasting their time, but nobody had asked.

At least Winters hadn’t let Schuldig touch him.

Winters’s fingers slipped from his hair, he stepped away. Ken slumped back against the wall, a dead weight, releasing the breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. No shit he hadn’t wanted his fucking picture taken.

“Mid-day, boy,” Winters said, just before he left. “I simply hope they find you worth something.”  
“They won’t,” Ken said, and now he smiled.

Alone again: again, he lost time. Curled up on the mattress he’d long since forgotten to avoid, he might have slept or simply drifted into a daze, but the next time Ken thought to raise his head the sliver of sky trapped outside his tiny window had grown dark. Mid-day, he thought, and for a moment he couldn’t remember why, and when he did it was only a strange kind of comfort. Whatever happened tomorrow, at least he wouldn’t have to face another night like this.

But an end at any cost wasn’t what he wanted either, and what the Hell difference did it make that he didn’t? He was just as trapped as he’d been four days ago, before _who do you work for_ and breath burning in his lungs, before hands on his body and the metallic taint of blood in his mouth, before Schuldig...

He hadn’t been able to escape then, either. Why the Hell would it be different now, now he was aching from cold and from hunger and dazed by dragging, days-old pain, now he was wracked with chills and even standing left him dizzy? The room was just as bare as ever, the window still too high to reach and too narrow to shimmy through even if it hadn’t been, and that presumed the glass could even be broken in the first place. The door still demanded a five-digit code before it would so much as think about opening. The neon light, set into the ceiling, was a diversion for the three seconds it took to rule that out, too.

Ken didn’t want to die, and nobody else was going to save him. He had to get out of here—

It was just too bad he had no idea how.

____  
  
  
He’d blown Monday, too, chasing up blind alley after dead end.

Monday brought another list of addresses, another handful of false leads, false hope. Yamanouchi’s family home in Tamagawa, shuttered and empty-looking. A factory on the other side of the city, all the way to Ichikawa to stare at a raddled, semi-functional wreck of a building that must have been quietly falling apart around it’s inhabitants’ ears for the best part of a decade. It could have been either of those places, or neither, and with nothing to go on how the Hell could they make a move? They’d reached an impasse and Youji knew it. Hours blown on pounding pavements and casing out buildings and he had nothing to show for it but damp hair and sore feet, and a painfully protesting ankle, and the leftover grime of the city sluicing off his skin when he washed his hands, turning the soapsuds a dirty gray.

He’d arrived back at the _Koneko_ just before close, sat in heavy silence in an empty shop watching the drizzle frosting the glass and the clock’s hands inching their way toward six p.m. while Aya stood at the centre table and fussed over a bouquet nobody had ordered. Youji found he couldn’t bear to watch him. His fluttering hands, the _snip-snip-snip_ of his shears… they were maddening, they left Youji’s own fingers twitching, set his teeth on edge.

“Would you quit that?”  
Aya’s hands stilled, his head raised. “What, working?”  
“Fussing.” Youji reached in his pocket for a cigarette, flicked open his lighter. “It’s annoying. Do we need another damn display arrangement?”  
“Don’t smoke in the shop.”  
Shooting Aya an irritated glare, Youji closed his lighter with an audible _snap_. “For Christ’s sake, Fujimiya, don’t give me that. We’ve got, what, five minutes to go? Not like anyone’s even here…”  
“Guys.” 

Omi. Youji hadn’t heard him come in. His eyes, when his teammates turned to look at him, were anxious.

“I think you should see this.”

And without so much as waiting to see if they were following Omi was gone, stepping back through the rear door and vanishing, headed, by the sound of his footfalls, straight for the basement. In other words, they were in trouble again – but what kind of trouble couldn’t even wait for the shutters to be drawn and the front door locked? This time, when Youji flicked open his lighter, Aya said nothing.

By the time Youji, his hands in his pockets, the cigarette dangling from his lower lip, had made it down the stairs, Omi was sat in front of an idling computer, chin pillowed on his propped-up hands. Brow furrowed, a frown tugging at his lips, the boy was staring intently at his own screensaver as if he was expecting to find the solution to all his problems there – the meaning of life, the answer to the Toudai entrance exams… as if, if he just looked hard enough, he would be led straight to Ken.

“What’s this all about?”  
Omi blinked, as if he hadn’t expected to be interrupted. As if he were startled to see Youji there. “Where’s Aya-kun?”  
“Locking up,” Youji told him. “He’ll be down in a minute. What’s going on here, Omi?”  
“Verwandlung.”

The rest of it, the boy’s expression told him, was just going to have to wait.

And what else was there to say to that? Youji leaned against the wall, he listened to the sound of Aya’s footfalls, the rattle of the shutters, the tireless purring of Omi’s computer’s fan. He told himself he felt just fine.

Youji had finished the cigarette and was making headway on his second (his palms were damp; there was a hard, tight little knot at the bottom of his stomach: if he couldn’t chain-smoke now then when the Hell could he?) when Aya finally deigned to join them. Well, Fujimiya, he thought, you sure took your sweet time about that, and then he thought, _cold-blooded bastard_ : he was, he realized, furious. Four days Ken had been missing, four goddamn days, the stupid kid could have washed up dead in the bay and Aya still figured he had time to fuck around playing at florists—

Whoa. Where the Hell had that come from? Caught off-guard by his own anger, Youji realized he was staring at Aya; he wrenched his gaze away, focusing on an unremarkable spot of dull green wall just above Omi’s head. Christ, if only he could stop thinking of Asuka.

“You had something to show us,” Aya said.  
Omi nodded. He tapped at his mouse, deactivating the screensaver. “Verwandlung made a demand.” 

A demand? Youji straightened, pushing away from the wall, but there was nothing to see on the computer screen but yet another e-mail, sent straight to Tetsugo Kasamatsu’s dead mailbox. _Men of Weiss, I write to you today to propose a trade that I have reason to believe we would both find most mutually beneficial…_ Christ, the whole thing was like that! All in a foreigner’s too-precise Japanese, the language so absurdly overformal it was almost a joke – but, if it truly was a joke, then who was it on?

“They sent me this about an hour ago. It was encrypted, but not heavily. They say they want to make a deal.”  
“What kind of deal?” Aya asked.  
“A… swap, I suppose. We give them what they want by noon tomorrow, and they say they’ll let Ken-kun go.”  
“Right. Why now?” Youji stubbed out his cigarette with slightly more violence than was necessary. “They’ve had him for four days and they’re just now figuring out why they bothered? What the Hell did they think they were doing all this time? They think he needed a vacation?”  
“No, Youji-kun. They were questioning him.” Omi’s voice was tight, his anger showing plain in the set of his jaw, the tension in his muscles. “I suppose they must have decided this was a better approach. Ken-kun…”

He hardly needed to finish that thought. Ken wouldn’t have said a word. That stupid, stubborn, brave little bastard!

It took Aya to break the silence. “How do we know it’s not a bluff?”  
“We don’t, Aya-kun,” Omi said quietly. “But there were photographs.”  
“Photographs?” Youji’s stomach turned over. “What, of Ken?”  
Omi nodded. “Taken this evening. He’s alive, Youji-kun, but…”  
But they’ve been questioning him. Don’t worry, Omi, I can fill in the blanks myself. “But what the Hell,” Youji asked incredulously, “do we have that they want?”  
And Omi said, “Moth.” 

Moth? It took a moment for Youji to place the name, and when he did (tall girl, auburn hair, and something offabout her that he couldn’t quite put his finger on) all it did was confuse the issue all the more. Verwandlung were after Moth? Not only wanted her, they wanted her back worse than they wanted anything that Ken might have to offer…

Which made Moth the best lead they’d got.

“They think _we_ have Moth?”  
“They’ve seen her with us,” Omi said. “Or that girl has. Komachi. You weren’t around then, Youji-kun, but she was here on Saturday. I think…” he hesitated: he looked away, his expression growing almost embarrassed. “I think they were after her for something. They were harassing her on the way home, so I… I stepped in. I guess they’d have taken her if I hadn’t been there. That’s probably what brought this on.”  
“But why,” Aya asked, “would they want her more than Hidaka?”  
And Youji met Aya’s narrow eyes, he saw realization there before he had said a word. “She knows something.”  
“She’s got to,” Omi agreed. “Maybe even where they’d have taken Ken-kun…”

And that led them straight from impasse to deadlock. What kind of a deal was this, apart from one Weiss couldn’t even begin to countenance? Hand over a woman, an innocent who’d come to trust them, to the men who wanted to silence her or worse… it was a despicable plan. Absolutely repellant. And yet, even as he recoiled from the very idea, wasn’t there a small, secret part of him that whispered that Moth couldn’t ever matter like Ken did, that knowing Moth was safe would be no comfort at all if her safety had been bought with Ken’s life? God. He disgusted himself – and yet there it was. I can’t, he was thinking. I can’t go through that again.

But what if he listened to that insinuating voice, what if he did betray the girl? Ken, he was sure, would despise him just as thoroughly as Youji would despise himself. If it came down to him or an innocent, Ken would be the first person to tell Verwandlung _no deal_. It wouldn’t even occur to him that he might be worth something too.

God damn it. God damnit, Hidaka.

“So,” Youji asked, “what the Hell are we going to do about it? We can’t let them get their hands on Moth either.”  
Omi sighed. He pinched the bridge of his nose, massaging his closed eyes with the balls of his finger and thumb. “I know that, Youji-kun. I just don’t see…”  
“The girl’s our best lead,” Aya said, and it wouldn’t have hurt so much if it hadn’t been nothing but the truth. “If it’s her or Hidaka, we have to choose her.”  
That cold-blooded bastard! “Now wait just a minute, Fujimiya—!”  
“Youji-kun, stop.” 

That’s an order.

He’d rounded on Aya, his fists balled: the redhead’s expression hadn’t so much as flickered, and that was the most maddening thing of all. God, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to pop the guy in the jaw. Ken would have understood, if he had been there – but if Ken had been here, none of this could ever have happened. Disgusted, Youji shook his head, he stepped away, he reached for cigarettes and lighter, he spat a curse as he slumped heavily down onto the couch. If only Asuka would get out of his head.

And Omi said, “Maybe we won’t have to choose.”

Say what? Blinking, Youji looked up; Aya raised a quizzical brow, but the look on their teammate’s face told them everything they needed to know. Omi Tsukiyono had left the building. This was Bombay of Weiss and, in Bombay’s mind, there was no dilemma at all. It wasn’t about who lived and who died. Get Ken out first, and there was no choice to make.

“We have eighteen hours,” Omi said. “And two new leads. I’ll take the e-mail. I might be able to trace where it was sent from. Aya-kun, Youji-kun, we need to find Moth fast. We’ve not got a lot to go on, but we know she’s a waitress at Café Rubin and her roommate’s name is Shizue. That might be…”  
“Ken,” Youji snapped his fingers. “Ken got her address. That first day, remember? We called her a cab. I went back with her.”  
“Really?” Already Omi was sounding excited. “Do you think we still have it?”  
“He wrote it on the order book. I can grab it on my way out the door—”  
Aya cut him off. “I’ll go.”  
“You?” Youji asked. “Hey, Aya… no offense, but why don’t I deal with the woman?”  
“You know why,” Aya said. “She loves me.”

That shut him up: too bad Aya had got it all wrong. That’s not it, he was thinking, that wasn’t it at all. _She likes you_ , he’d told him. _Now make the most of it_ … but Youji hadn’t meant it like this, he had never intended anything so – so cold, and so utterly mercenary. He had never intended Aya to use Moth like this, to pick her up and put her down again as if it were nothing at all, to raise her hopes only to shatter them completely and to do it for her own good, and for Ken’s.

But you were prepared to kill her. All he wants to do is break her heart.

Moth was going to get hurt, this much was unavoidable, but at least this way she’d be alive to feel it. Youji turned his back. He didn’t look at Aya as the redhead mounted the stairs, the door slamming shut behind him; he didn’t look up when he heard the slam of a car door, the distant roar of the Porsche’s engine. So much for your scruples, Kudou. The devil was a gentleman, too.

____  
  
  
No. No, he couldn’t go on like this. Another night spent staring at the ceiling, waiting for whoever-it-was to fall asleep, to free him from this tempest of second-hand emotion. Another morning waking with a cry, huddling beneath his bedsheets nauseous with someone else’s curdled anger and nameless dread: it’s not you, he had whispered to himself, it’s not your fear, but what good did that do him when fear was all he had? I don’t know what I feel, Shinobu thought, for what felt like the millionth time; he wondered, again, if he ever had.

What must it be like to live guided by nothing but your own emotions? Sometimes he thought it must be frightening, to be so alone; on a day like today, Shinobu could only envy it. It must, he thought, be very quiet. It must be very clear.

God, how he craved that clarity, that calm.

And yet he wasn’t supposed to want anything of the sort. To be useful should have been enough of a reward.

It wasn’t enough. Not today it wasn’t. Even knowing that the President would have no use for him if, instead of being dragged from sleep by pain and hopelessness, he’d simply woken to find himself alone, wasn’t enough to make him feel that the pain was worth it. He’d simply had enough of sharing strangers’ grief, and if what he was feeling now was unbearable then it was only a matter of degree. If whoever-this-was were to vanish right now, all that would mean was that he or she was gone. They, the others, would still be there, he would still have the constant ache of their sorrow and confusion, dull and nagging as a bone-deep bruise…

To Hell with it. He’d take it. It wouldn’t be silence, but it was as near to it as Shinobu had ever had.

All right, then. As soon as he thought it (Why _shouldn’t_ they go?) something taut and wound-up inside of him seemed to uncoil, grown suddenly slack; Shinobu felt a smile stealing across his lips. Never mind why the stranger had been brought here or what it was the President or any of the others might have wanted with them. He didn’t consider any of that. He simply slipped, unmissed and unregarded, from his room and out into the complex proper, threading his way through the emptying corridors as he headed toward the laboratories.

It was funny how easy it was. Almost, after wrestling for days over what to do about whoever-this-was, anticlimactic. It hadn’t even been difficult to find the scalpel: he was a familiar enough sight, by now, around the laboratories that the night staff simply looked right through him. (Isn’t that the Professor’s kid? Must be on an errand…) It wasn’t until Shinobu had made it into the testing suites and down into the storage areas that a gowned and masked technician thought to ask him what he was doing down there, and if the excuse he’d hastily concocted as he ducked away from the autoclave hadn’t made a lot of sense—

“Shinobu? How did you get in here?”  
“The President sent me. She… well, I need to collect some data.”  
“Data? You should know where the offices are by now, kid…”  
“I, um… they said Professor Gersten was down here.” 

—well, the laboratory workers knew better than to question one of Shun Yamanouchi’s personal staff. He palmed the scalpel, tucked it up his sleeve; he let the technician lead him up to the offices. The Professor would be there in a few minutes. Would he be okay to wait by himself?

Shinobu thanked him, and smiled at him, and stole away again as soon as the technician’s back was turned. If the staff wouldn’t think to ask why he was here, Professor Gersten was another matter entirely.

He had ten minutes – or maybe fifteen, at the outside. Shinobu darted back out into empty, echoing corridors, breaking into a run as he followed the trail of the stranger’s desperate fear, felt it doubling and doubling again as he grew closer to its source. They were louder now, too, their onrushing emotions no longer muffled by distance and depth. Normally he stuck carefully to the upper rooms, where he had nothing but the steady pulse of their drugged despair: it was familiar to him as the thrum of air-conditioning or the purr of cars on the road, a sound so familiar he could quite close his ears to it. Now, thrust back among them, Shinobu could pick out the individual threads in their tapestry of drugged grief, a tight and terrible weave of weariness and isolation and loss, and simple _why-me_ confusion…

Then, tearing clear through the heart of it, there was the other one. Nobody had thought to drug him.

Shinobu might have asked himself why not. Might have realized, if he’d only stopped to think, that the stranger’s mood had subtly but unmistakably shifted into a different key. He might – and there was anticipation there, an edge of nervous thrill – have stopped to wonder what in the world there was to be excited about here. He simply ran.

There. Shinobu stopped short outside the stranger’s room, and the sudden little skip of fear he felt was at least all his own work. He tightened his grip on the scalpel, he steeled himself. Another minute and this would all be over. I’m sorry, he thought, but it’s either you or me and you don’t even belong here, I was here first. It’s nothing personal, I promise, I know you don’t know what you’re doing to me. I know you can’t help hurting. I still need you to stop.

No going back now. Shinobu pushed open the door.

____  
  
  
There’d been no kind of plan. There’d just been the naked desperation of a man with nothing left to lose.

He couldn’t improvise a weapon, he had nowhere to hide but behind the door, and nothing to do but wait and pray that whoever it was came down here next would be stupid enough to come alone. Sure, maybe it was suicide – but so was staying put. If he made a break for it and got nothing for his trouble but a bullet through the head, it was better than sticking around for another… what, twelve hours? Fourteen? Longer? and getting nothing for his patience but exactly the same payoff. Ken was unarmed and exhausted, and completely alone: why the Hell shouldn’t he gamble when whatever he did he would be no worse off? Better to go out on his own terms than die like a dog down here.

So he’d dragged himself to his feet, and stood in the lee of the door with his back pressed to the wall, his fingers laced and his eyes tightly closed: at a glance he could almost have been praying, but all Ken was thinking was _please_. I don’t want to die, Lord. Not here. Not like this. He didn’t know how long he stood there, how long he waited, it wasn’t like he had any way to check. It’s Monday, Ken told himself. It’s Monday night.

And hurrying footsteps in the corridor, the _click_ of a latch as the door swung open. Ken’s breath got stuck in his throat, he felt himself tense. _Here goes nothing_ —!

He sprang, bringing his elbows down hard on the back of the intruder’s neck.

They fell, a shining something flying from one hand to clatter across the tiles and away. Ken dived for it, snatching at the thing as it skittered toward the wall and to hell with the wrenching, tearing pain that ripped through his shoulder: it wasn’t until his hand had closed around it and he was scrambling back to his feet that he realized what it was the stranger had been carrying. Some weird kind of knife, with a skinny steel handle and a wickedly sharp blade—no, not a knife, a scalpel. A surgical bloody scalpel.

Jesus fuck.

But it was a weapon, and it would do. Never mind the why of it or what the Hell the stranger had wanted: the only thing that mattered was that, for the first time in days, luck was running with him. So far so good, and all he had to do was shut whoever this was up and run for the door – but then Ken glanced back down at the figure on the floor. He froze.

It was a child. A kid of twelve or so, their tumbled hair only a shade or two darker than their pallid skin, lay unmoving on the tiles. Boy or girl? No way of telling. The hair was cut to the jaw, the clothing (more goddamn white) looked flatly institutional. A moment before he had been hoping against hope that the stranger was dead already; now Ken prayed quite fervently that they weren’t. Never mind that they had—Jesus fuck this kid had been trying to kill him! Monday night and hours to go before his time ran out and Verwandlung had sent a child with a scalpel to do their dirty work for them? What the fuck was going on here?

“You all right?”

Shit.

Christ, what did he have to go and ask that for?! He had spoken without thinking and Ken cursed himself for it, but what else could he have done? He couldn’t walk away now. He just couldn’t.

The stranger stirred, pushing themselves to hands and knees; instinctively, Ken raised the scalpel. _Stay back_. They rubbed at their neck, raised their head, they looked up at him and even their wide child’s eyes were more white than gray. For a single awful moment, he wondered if the kid might be blind.

“You hit me.” Their voice was a nothing, almost a whisper, and as curiously neutral as everything else about them.  
“You wanted me _dead_!” He was shouting. He didn’t care.  
The kid flinched. They looked almost affronted. “Gone,” they said, as if that should change everything.  
“What the Hell’s the difference?”  
“You won’t leave me alone!”  
“What?” For a moment, Ken forgot he was supposed to be angry. The child sounded furious; the look on the their face said they believed every word they were saying. This kid’s trying to _kill_ you—! and in the stranger’s mind he would have brought it on himself. He’d done this child wrong and he’d never seen them before in his life, and how the Hell did that make any kind of sense? Either the kid was out of their goddamn mind, or… “What’s that supposed to mean?”  
“You…” The child broke off, dropping their gaze. “It sounds stupid.”  
Sure, Ken thought. Whatever. Now imagine my idea of reality is about as fucked-over as it can get. “Try me.”  
For a moment, the child said nothing. They simply sat there, staring at the tiles and worrying at their lip. Weighing up, he supposed, whether or not they should say anything. “I need you gone,” they said finally. “You… you know the stuff you feel? I can feel it too.”

After everything Ken had seen? The problem was it didn’t sound nearly stupid enough. He lowered the scalpel, cuffed hands held loosely before him. The kid didn’t look like they were lying, and Schwarz wouldn’t be the only four guys on the entire planet who could do the things they did, would they? Say this child really was everything they said they were, wouldn’t wanting him gone make a crazy kind of sense? Especially after—

(Oh, Jesus fuck. This kid feels what you feel.)

“So,” Ken said cautiously, “how am I feeling?”  
The kid looked back up. “You believe me,” they said. “And you’re nowhere near as surprised as you should be.” 

You’re already gambling, Hidaka. You can’t stop playing now. Of course, he knew the child could be lying. It wouldn’t even have been difficult. Ken was an open book, always had been; everyone who knew him knew that. No reason a stranger couldn’t have worked it out, too – but in a matter of moments, in a situation like this? How could some strange kid feeding him a line about knowing what he felt help? What the Hell was the scalpel for, then?

But if all this was true, if all the child wanted was his absence…

“You’ve got to go,” the child said. “I know what you feel. I don’t like it.”  
And Ken said, “Then prove it. Help me.”

 Please.


	10. Geschäft: One more night

It was a relief to know himself lost. To leave the hallway-and-a-half he’d been confined to in favor of finding himself somewhere he hadn’t seen before – not, after a moment, that there was any way to tell them apart. He’d traded one basement corridor for its white-walled twin, lined, on one side, with identical white doors with fish-eye spy-holes. It could have been a hospital except that beside the door, where the patients’ name cards should have been, there were nothing but random numbers placed almost, but not quite in sequence.

Four days he’d stuck it. Another five minutes would be far more than Ken could handle.

There was – wasn’t there? – there was something off about this place, something about this warren of near-identical corridors that had him catching his breath and speaking in whispers. The silence, broken only by the soft, almost tidal wheeze of some unseen piece of equipment trapped just behind one of these identical doors, was oppressive. No way was that all in his head. Something was seriously fucking wrong!

“What the Hell is this place?” Ken heard himself say. Then, more practically, “Where the _fuck_ are we?”  
“Sagamihara,” the child said. “This is where they do the tests.”  
Oh. Good. “Which way’s Tokyo?”  
“I’ll show you to the front gates. That’s as far as I can go.”

Ken gave the child a sidelong glance; he said nothing at all. Maybe it wasn’t much but it was a start, if his luck were to hold it might just be good enough: it would do, God damn it, whatever happened afterward at least he’d be out—

Now how far do you trust this kid, Ken? Five minutes ago they wanted you dead.

But that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t about trust. It was – it was simply a _chance_ , and it was the only chance he had. Sure, maybe it hurt to move. Maybe his head was swimming and his limbs ached, maybe he’d made his shoulder bleed again and the handcuffs were chafing at his wrists, but he ignored them. He had to ignore them. _Had to get out of here_ : the rest, he told himself, could wait. Find your way home first. He’d worry about what it all meant later.

Sure. Now tell yourself you’re going to get that far.

So he stumbled in the child’s wake down the corridor, and told himself that he was the one in control.

And the child led him onward, down another wide, straight corridor and through a pair of hospital doors, the kind that swing both ways so an orderly with a loaded trolley could nudge them open with its nose. Led him into elevator hall, two sets of stainless-steel doors set side by side, both wide enough to accommodate a gurney and, tucked away next to it, an afterthought of a staircase. The air (even that was familiar) out here it smelled of antiseptic and cleaning fluid with a grace-note of the fouler odors they were there to cover up and, how weird, there was a suggestion of that acetone smell again. He could almost have been back on the burn ward – almost, but not quite.

God, he’d be glad to get out of here. Never mind the bit where he’d been – where he had to get back home, the whole place was giving him the creeps. The kid (a boy, Ken realized, he’s a boy, and then he wondered how the Hell he could be so sure) hesitated in front of the elevators. Ken aimed for the stairs.

“Why are you here?”

Shit! The boy had turned back to him, hesitating with one hand on the banisters. Kid asks him a question and he jumps a fucking mile.

“For Christ’s sake keep your voice down!”  
The child gave him an appraising look. No, it never paid to underestimate how much kids could catch on to. “You don’t have to tell me.”  
“I—“ Ken caught himself. What the Hell could he say to a question like that? “I don’t know,” he said finally, and realized he was telling the truth. He should never have let them take him; they should never have taken him alive. “I… fuck it, I really don’t know. Why don’t you ask your… whoever the fuck calls the shots round here, why the Hell are you here anyway, shouldn’t you be in school?”  
The kid shrugged. (Definitely a boy.) “I live here.”  
“You _live_ here?” Ken echoed. “What happened to your parents?”  
“They left.” Nothing changed in the child’s face. He could have been talking about the weather. “It’s this way.”

Upstairs, then.

There was another electronic lock at the top of the stairs, this one demanding a keycard. Clearly, though, whoever’d set the system up hadn’t thought to worry overmuch about anyone getting out; the lock on the basement side had disengaged with a single push of a button. Sloppy, Ken thought, but so much the better. Let the bastards learn the hard way why _that_ wasn’t going to work.

He might even have thought to wonder why the precaution, but one glance around the place he’d ended up in told him everything he needed to know.

All it was, was an ordinary office. The door the boy led him through was tucked away at the bottom of a corridor lined with glass-fronted meeting rooms, shielded away behind Working Salaryman venetian blinds, and one set of glass-fronted doors from… from nothing at all. From a large open-plan office, totally empty and silent, the workstations laden with the usual diligent piles of stuff, all arranged just obsessively-compulsively so. It looked like an accounts department. Christ, it _was_ a fucking accounts department. Accounts Payable, Financial Systems, Purchasing Team… cluttered in-trays, silent computers, a photocopier and a fax machine.

And there was the boy, skinny and ghost-pale in his hospital pajamas, and then there was Ken. Barefoot, bloodied, his hands manacled before him, picking his way between the desks…

A reception area, as silent as the office had been. Another corridor. A fire exit.

“Hey, won’t that…”

The boy shook his head. “It’s quite safe.” As if to prove it – Ken started forward, one hand raised: just how far do you trust this kid? – he pressed down on the crash bar and slipped away, through the open door. Nothing happened.

Define safe, Ken wanted to say, but he didn’t.

He stepped out into the night.  
____

“… and do you _know_ what she said? She said she was just being friendly! I mean can you believe that? Every time we get one of these foreign guys in she is _all over them_ and she’s chatting away in English so everyone can hear how great she is at it and now she says she’s just being friendly! Shizue-chan, are you listening to me?”

Oh, the bloom was off the rose all right. To think of all the hours she’d wasted dreaming herself a new life in the big city, and of – of everything she’d been through to get there, and for what? All day on her feet and getting groped on the way home, the reek of coffee and a run in her hose, and four hours of Mami bloody Akimoto and her airs and her English and her perky bloody pigtails just to add to her joy— and nothing at the end of it but beef bowl and a trendy drama, and Shizue bowed over some boring old textbook with Debussy on her headphones, before falling into her futon. Wash, rinse and repeat.

 Moth was starting to suspect she’d been oversold on Tokyo, that it had nothing to offer her she couldn’t have found anywhere else – except for one thing, perhaps, and she hadn’t even dared go near the flower shop for days. Might never have the nerve again, after what had happened with Omi—

  _No_. No, Shizue couldn’t know about that. Mami, that’s all you’re upset about. Just Mami.

 Shizue sighed. She raised her head from her textbook, put down her pen. “I thought you were over foreign guys.”  
“That’s not the point! It’s… look, maybe I just want to be friendly too. And anyway, she is _such a snob_. She won’t even talk to me and every other word out her mouth is _at_ _college_ this and _at college_ that… Hello, we know you’re at college, you don’t have to rub it in.”  
“But I do that,” Shizue said to her dry old book. “Should I… I mean, I don’t have to, if it upsets you?”  
Moth colored. She glanced away. “But it’s – yeah, but it’s different when you do it,” she said awkwardly. “I mean, it’s not like you’re stuck-up about it…”

 Mercifully, the doorbell choose that moment to ring. Wait, the doorbell? Moth saw Shizue start, saw her glancing this way and that about the living-room (unpressed clothes draped on the backs of chairs, an empty Mushroom Mountain box still resting on one of the kitchen worksurfaces, a pile of books on the counter) and then straight at her.

“Hideko,” she said, “have you been giving my address out?”  
“What? No! Why would I…”  
“If you get me in another mess like that night with Hasegawa and his brother!”  
Moth bridled. “I haven’t! That was years ago, can’t you let it go?”  
“You get it,” was all Shizue said. “I’m busy.”

Without another word, she gathered up her textbooks and her notepads and even that stupid Debussy CD, and stalked off into the bedroom. Sighing – honestly, that girl was so uptight! – Moth padded over to the door, throwing the bolt and opening it wide.

“Aya-san!”

She damn near fell over.

Moth gasped. Her eyes went wide, she felt the blood rush to her cheeks; for a moment she could do nothing but stand there and stare, her lips foolishly parted, blushing like a schoolgirl. It was Aya all right, Aya from the flower shop, tall and stern and – and perfect as always, his pale, pale skin offset by the black of his clothes and the flaming red of his tumbled hair, and those narrow amethyst eyes fixed on her face. Were those dahlias he was holding? Yes, dahlias, a riot of them in lava red and sherbet orange and candy pink. Oh, my God.

“I…” Say something. Say something, damn it! “I, I didn’t… how did you know my address?”  
He didn’t answer, or at least not directly. “I wanted to talk to you.”  
“Me?” Moth’s hands flew to her mouth. Oh, would she never stop blushing? “I, but I…”  
“Omi told me what happened. I came to see if you needed anything.” 

 _Oh my God_.

“You…” Stupid with shock, hardly daring to believe she’d heard him right, Moth simply stared at him for what felt like about a million years. He’s kidding, she thought, but then, it doesn’t look like he’s kidding – why come all this way, just to play a stupid joke? You’re not in high school any more. Do something, she thought frantically, do something _do something_ … “I, that’s really—come in! Please!”

And threw open the door then bolted for the kitchen, desperately patting at her disheveled hair. Tea things, where were the tea things, oh _please_ tell me Shizue-chan has tea things I know she’s a shrinking violet but everyone has them! she can’t be the only person in the entire _world_ who doesn’t _there_. Now all she needed was… was something to go with it. _Mochi_. Thank God she’d thought to grab some on the way home from work… Moth stole a quick look over her shoulder as if to confirm that Aya was still there, then she turned back to the cakes, blushing again. God, the room was a state, what must he think of her… quickly, she stuffed the cookie box into the trash, hoping against hope he hadn’t had time to spot it.

Wait, you haven’t shut the doo— oh, Aya had closed it behind him. Thank goodness.

(In the bedroom, Shizue turned the _Suite Bergamasque_ up to a volume normally associated with rock concerts.)

The kettle was already boiling, the _mochi_ laid out on the prettiest plate she could find at five seconds’ notice, as Moth turned to Aya with a shy smile. “Um, do you want a drink?”  
“I’m all right.” He was gazing around the tiny room almost critically, those extraordinary eyes narrowing as he took in all the clutter and confusion that came as standard when two busy girls lived in one another’s pockets, and she felt herself color yet again, worrying at her lower lip as she smoothed at her skirt. Maybe Aya didn’t like a girl who was no good at keeping house. Probably he hadn’t missed the stupid cookie box, after all… “These need to go in water.”  
“Oh… of course! Of course, I’ve got a vase, if you’ll just give me a—”

 A minute for the sad-looking bunch of freesia she’d bought last time she’d visited the shop to join the cookie box in the trash. Pulling a face at the freesia’s slimy, water-slick stems, Moth hurried to refill the vase; she watched as Aya fussed, with expert hands, over the dahlias. How light his touch was, how deft as he plucked at stray leaves and fronds of greenery, as he carefully tweaked the blooms so they stood _just so_. How slender his wrists were, what long, clever fingers he had…

 _Tea_ , Moth. Tea. Flushing again, pressing her own hands to her burning cheeks, she turned back to the kettle, stirring up a busy-sounding clatter as she fidgeted with the saucers and cups; she stole a quick glance over at Aya through a fall of her hair as he bent to rest the flowers in the centre of the windowsill. He’s here. He really is here.

Finally, _finally_ the kettle deigned to finish boiling, shutting itself off with a quiet click.

“Um, won’t you sit down?”

He sat. Sat at Shizue’s tiny _kotatsu_ and watched her as she set out the cups and plates and, kneeling, poured the tea. How intently he watched her! he probably didn’t miss the way her hands trembled as she poured, the dribble of tea that slopped over the side of her cup and onto the tabletop, and the thought of what he must have been assuming about it all – her nervousness, her blushes, her clumsy, fluttering gestures – only made her shake all the more.

And Aya said nothing. He just watched her. Moth swallowed, she picked up her cup and, holding it in both hands, she gazed down into it as if it could tell her what to say; she sipped it, to steady herself, to buy herself a second or two more to think of something to say. Oh, if only she could stop blushing! Like a schoolgirl, she thought. Like she was innocent.

“Um.” God, her mouth was dry! Moth ran her tongue over her lips, she snuck another glance at Aya. “You… I mean, I’m okay now. You can tell Omi-san… I guess I must have worried him. But I’m okay. You didn’t—” She swallowed again, blushing miserably. “You didn’t have to come all this way.”  
“You did.” Aya looked away. Said, after the longest silence in the history of the world, “We all worried.”  
Oh my God. Moth put down her tea, she pressed one hand to her lips. “You were worried?”  
“Moth,” Aya said. “What are you running from?”  
“Nothing!” The denial was panicked, reflexive; she spoke far too quickly. “I—”

 Then she caught herself.

 Moth raised her head. She met, for the first time, Aya’s eyes.

 “I…” she began – and then her courage deserted her. Why would Aya believe her? Why would anyone, never mind a man like this? Nobody ever had before. Her own mother never— “Oh, it’s no good! You wouldn’t… you’d think I was making it up!”  
At first it seemed that Aya would say nothing. His brow wrinkled, as if in thought or pain. “You’re afraid,” he said after a while, as if he were picking his words carefully. “You must have a reason for it.”  
Don’t cry. Please, please, don’t let me start crying. “It – but, Aya-san… it sounds so crazy.”  
“That,” Aya said quietly, “hardly makes it untrue.”

You’re going to have to tell someone, sometime. Nothing would change if Moth stayed silent. She’d still be frightened and hunted; she would still be putting Shizue in danger simply by being near her, still be utterly alone. The doctors would still be out there, watchful and patient, they would still want her back where they thought she belonged. To them, she was valuable…

But maybe, just maybe, they weren’t the only ones who valued her. Aya was real, he was there; he had come all this way just to speak to her. He was worried. It was time she stopped running.

Moth took a deep breath, she steeled herself as she climbed to her feet. “All right,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

And, lifting the hem of her blouse, she bared the angry inverted Y of her scar.  
____

The first thing he noticed were the stars. Thousands and thousands of stars scattered carelessly across the inky skies, above the looming silhouettes of mountains too close at hand and the low-lying roofs of Sagamihara, with nothing but a burnished band about the horizon to signpost the way to the city. The sky, too wide and too large, oppressed him; the stars were terrifying in their brilliance.

 Oh, God. Home felt so far away.

“It’s this way,” the boy said. Then, when Ken still hung back, he frowned. He said, “Are you coming?”  
Well, what choice did he have? “Sure. Sure. Don’t walk so fast.”

It’s cold. A chill night breeze crazed Ken’s hair, tugged at the thin fabric of his tee-shirt, the concrete was icy against his bare feet. If they’d had to take his jacket, the bastards could have left him his goddamn shoes! At least he supposed the cold would keep him moving, keep him awake.

The campus – Christ, what maniac designed this goddamn place? – the campus was a bad dream in concrete and steel, a place that seemed to have been grown, not made. It was a nightmarish Sixties hangover of building after low-lying building, bizarre crystalline structures connected by a labyrinth of covered walkways and flights of shallow stairs; of paths that led nowhere bathed in sickly pools of sodium light. Ken could have wandered those paths for hours and still not found his way to freedom, walked past the same building a dozen times over and never have known it…

The boy, too fast and too careless, flitted quickly and purposefully from block to block, slipping from shadow to light and back again as he led him – well, fuck, he’d just have to trust the kid that he was leading him out. Sure, it was a stupid goddamn idea, but it wasn’t like he had any better ones.

Ken wished he could sit down. This wouldn’t have been so bad if some sadist hadn’t kept moving the floor—

“Security guard.”  
And the boy stretched out an arm. Ken damn near walked into it. “Shit!” he spat – even Ken couldn’t have said what he was cursing. The guard, himself, Schuldig, the whole stupid situation. “Now what?”  
“This way,” the boy whispered, and ducked back into the shadows, worming his way into the too-small gap between a gas tank and the wall of the building it was bracketed to. Ken bit back a curse, he hissed in pain as he barked an elbow against the brickwork; there were cobwebs in his hair and mud oozed about his bare feet but he couldn’t seem to feel anything but grateful for the chance to rest.

For a moment Ken simply leaned against the wall, his eyes closed and his head tipped back, as he tried to catch his breath. His shirt was clinging with too much intimacy to the skin of his back, the night air felt abnormally cool against his cheeks. He wiped at his brow, he pressed the back of one hand to his mouth. Christ damn these fucking handcuffs. Don’t stop now, Hidaka. Whatever you do, just don’t stop. 

He opened his eyes, his grip tautened about the scalpel and damn the fact it helped nothing. He risked a glance at the guard.

The night watchman’s footfalls were slow and steady, his gaze disinterested, his shoulders hunched against the cold. No dog. No gun – at least, not one that Ken could see. Just a flashlight and a two-way radio, and the glowing point of a cigarette clamped tight between his teeth. He was exactly like every other security guard Ken had ever had to run and hide from. He was just doing his job, and he was bored: and then he stopped walking, and he stared straight at them.

Ken closed his eyes again, he held his breath like a kid playing hide-and seek, hoping that if he stayed silent and still he’d somehow make a bad hiding place a better one: he needn’t have bothered. The guard had stopped and swung his torch because this was always where he stopped, always where he shone his flashlight at nothing at all. His eyes slipped over them as if they weren’t even there; he drew on the cigarette, rubbing his bare hands to warm them up; he walked away, proceeding calm and deliberate as a policeman. He’d been doing this job too long to let a little thing like an intruder bother him. Or an escapee.

“Does he know?” Ken heard himself say, his voice barely more than a whisper.  
“Know about what?”  
“About…” Ken hesitated. “You know. About the tests.”  
And the boy blinked, he looked at him like he was crazy. “The President says they don’t need to.”

Oh. Oh, Jesus Christ. (There really _was_ something wrong.)

And nothing for it, once the man’s footfalls had faded and there was nothing to hear but the noise of distant traffic, the frantic, whirring cry of the last cicadas of summer, but to keep moving. The boy slipped past him as he hesitated in the shadows, stepping back onto the pathway and disappearing down a stairway: all Ken could do was follow.

Follow, down another path and past a building like the flayed chest of a concrete titan, an exposed ribcage in steel and shards of glass. Yes, it was like a dream and a bad one at that. A dream of pursuit through a place he could only half believe in, with Ken – he had broken (just get me _out_ of here!) into a run – forced to flee from something as nameless as terror itself. A dream where his legs didn’t seem to want to work right, where no matter how far or how fast he ran it would never be quite fast enough…

 And then there was Schuldig as well. Now he _had_ to be dreaming.

 Schuldig. All tumbled red hair and moon-white clothes, propped up against one of the titan’s ribs with a cigarette in his hand. Ken stopped short. Stopped and stared at the man and all he could think was _run_. For God’s sake, run—he didn’t move. Couldn’t seem to make his legs work or his body obey his brain, he’d forgotten how to fucking breathe and all Schuldig did was watch. Watch Ken watching him, and touch his cigarette to his lips, and smile.

“Bye,” Schuldig said. “Tell Aya to kiss his sister for me.” And he waved.

 Fuck this. Fuck everything! Ken bolted – but not fast enough to miss it when Schuldig started to laugh.  It’s a dream. It’s a bad fucking dream!

Ken ran, ran from the silent and shuttered building, down a shallow flight of stairs and onto another over-lit pathway lined with weary, wind-blown bushes and leading to nothing but more of the same. Don’t look back, never look back: he turned all the same. Schuldig hadn’t moved. He simply stood there, one hand raised in salute, and watched him go. See you around, Siberian. Now tell your buddies exactly what I did to you. Go on. I dare you—

“Hold it!”

There was light in his eyes, and he couldn’t stop now.

Ken stopped thinking. Only one thing for it: he moved. Flinging himself forward, head down and shoulder raised, burying the hard, bony point of one elbow into the intruder’s stomach. Felt the stranger stagger, heard the breath forced from the man’s lungs in a single convulsive gasp. He just about had time to notice the man’s eyes go wide, see him fumble, one-handed, for the trigger of his radio before he was falling, knees buckling as Ken bore him bodily to the ground.

Another guard, he realized as he pushed himself back to hands and knees. A man not much older than he was in a bulky warm-up jacket and heavy boots, his shoulders heaving and eyes squeezed tight with pain as he fought to catch his breath. His peaked cap had been knocked from his head, the two-way radio lying out of reach on the path: all Ken needed was time and he’d just bought himself a whole handful of it. He snatched for the guard’s hair, he slammed his head down with a hard, dull _crack_ against the cobblestones; scrambling to his feet, he kicked the man in the ribs once twice three times – he was taking aim for a fourth when he heard someone breathe in, sharp and sudden, and he remembered the boy.

The boy. Stood a few feet away, his eyes saucer-wide, his cheeks even paler than they’d been before, he stared at Ken as if he’d never seen him before, never seen anything like him in his life. Horrified, he realized.

Sure, the kid had tried to kill him: now Ken realized he hadn’t had a clue what that meant. He was glad of it.

The boy swallowed hard, he found his voice. “You’re hurting him.”  
It was all Ken could do not to start laughing – but if he had, he knew he’d never be able to stop. “I’m sorry?”  
“ _Stop_.”  
Stop? For a moment, Ken simply stared. Looked between the boy and the groaning guard, and then back at the boy again. He said, “Fuck this.”

Now they develop scruples. He stooped and picked up the forgotten radio, and threw it hard against the path, watching as the casing shattered, the batteries skittered across the flagstones and rolled into the dirt. And he ran.~  
_____  
  
Hepatectomy: the surgical resection of the liver.

The scar on Moth’s chest – there was no mistaking it – had clearly been left by a scalpel. The girl had been pulled apart and patched back up again, so recently the scar blazed livid red against the fishbelly-white flesh of her stomach, still stippled with the marks the surgeon’s needle had left when it sewed her shut. Aya stared for far longer than he should have; he thought of Sakura, and the scar she had never seen. Same shit, Ken would have said. Different day.

“It’s ugly, isn’t it?”

Moth’s voice was low, tears stood out in the corners of her eyes. Her hands, where they gripped the hem of her blouse, visibly shook.

“What happened?” was all Aya asked, but it was enough.

Her name was Hideko Adachi. She’d never liked it. Oh, Adachi wasn’t so bad, but Hideko – she’d been named for an aunt who’d died long before she was born – God, it was so old-fashioned it made her cringe. She’d lived all her life in Tottori prefecture, in a port town called Sakaiminato: Aya had heard of it, but that was where it ended. Sakaiminato was nowhere. The only thing to do there was leave. For as long as she could remember, she had been dreaming of the day when she’d turn her back on the place for good and, from the moment her dreams began, Hideko had played no part in them.

She’d been Hinarin as a child. Then Akane, then Amaya: briefly, in middle school, she’d been Rain. At fifteen she’d become Hotaru – but it was Moth who, six months previously, had packed a bag and slipped from the house while her parents were out, and boarded the first train to Tokyo. It had seemed like the fulfillment of all her dreams but Tokyo, for Moth, hadn’t even begun.

The stranger got on at Maibara. He’d taken the seat opposite her; he’d struck up a conversation as the train picked up speed and the shores of Lake Biwa slipped away behind them. His name was Kameda. He was a private secretary at Tellus Pharmaceuticals. She’d told him (fearing that the truth would bore him and humiliate her, that he wouldn’t want to waste another word on a part-time clerk in a convenience store) that she was a hotel receptionist. He was a narrow young man, with sandy hair and high cheekbones, and dark, intelligent eyes. His clothes were quietly expensive, his speech cultured, his manner polite.

He’d made her smile.

 _Can you type?_ he’d asked, after a while.  
Moth had nodded. She’d said, _Of course_. She felt a little bad to have lied – but really, how hard could it be?

She shouldn’t have gone with him. Even then she’d known that, felt a sudden rush of giddy near-fear when Kameda had offered that they share a taxi on the way to meet the man who could get her into the secretarial pool, but she’d been too busy wondering why in the world she’d told him she could type to think too much on that.

The last thing she remembered was Kameda offering her a cigarette—

And then?

“Then,” Moth said softly, “I woke up there.”  
There it was: what he’d come for. If she’d known Aya at all, she’d have noticed his eyes narrow. “Where?”

Of course she had never known. She wasn’t in Tokyo, that was all.

(And nobody would be looking for her, not Shizue, not even her mother; nobody at all would think to find her there.)

And, for a while, that was all she said. Moth – Hideko – fell silent, her head bowed, her eyes shadowed by her bangs and her arms pressed tight across her body, as if she were cold. She hadn’t really been in the mood for _mochi_ either. For a moment, Aya caught himself wishing he’d let Youji handle this one after all. Youji would have taken her hands, he would have smiled and said all the right things. He’d make it comfortable, make it seem easy and only natural. She would have opened out to him.

But, he thought, and the thought felt cold and hard as steel, maybe none of that would be necessary after all. Maybe, for Moth, it’s enough that it’s you who’s asking.

Sat in the basement, his long face pale, his eyes not sleepy but simply exhausted, Youji turned his back on him.

“Is that,” Aya said finally, “where they did…”  
Did that, yes. Moth nodded once. “I… don’t know what they want with it,” she said slowly. “But… but I do know this, Aya-san. Once isn’t enough.”  
Aya blinked. He felt himself frown. “Why not?”  
Moth swallowed. “It… it grows back,” she whispered. “They only take a bit. And it grows back. And then they do it again.”

Moth, it turned out, had been laid open by the surgeon’s knife four times. It would have been more, if she’d stayed.

But she hadn’t been alone. There were others, not that she’d seen them. She’d heard them, though – heard the chiming of equipment and footsteps in the corridor, the steady squeak of the wheels of a gurney stopping at someone else’s door, the creak of hinges and the click of a lock. Once, just once, there’d been voices: a technician’s, and then the voice of a man she didn’t recognize. Her room, where she lay in a drugged stupor with nothing to do but wait to be taken and torn open, was tiny, laid out to what was clearly a standardized pattern. The passageways were lined with doors exactly like hers.

Which was where it might have ended, if it hadn’t been for pure dumb luck. Her door sometimes stuck when they closed it, and that hadn’t meant anything at all until the night when an orderly had come to change a dressing, only to be unexpectedly called away. It was five minutes before Moth noticed the door, another fifteen before she found the courage to slip out of bed and, hardly daring to breathe, to steal over to it, expecting the orderly to return any minute…

“But he didn’t come back,” she said simply. “So I found my clothes and left.”  
“And that’s all it took?”  
Moth smiled awkwardly, and again she couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “Well,” she said, as if she wasn’t sure she should be telling him this at all, “this guy gave me a ride to Gotanda.” 

You’re not mad, are you, Aya-san?

Aya didn’t have time for this. “And you don’t remember where you were?”

“I fell asleep,” Moth said apologetically, then – wait, why am I sorry? – she frowned. “I didn’t think it was that important. Um, Aya-san… why are you asking me all this?”  
Aya blinked. If she’d known him at all she would have known she’d surprised him and he shouldn’t have been, damn it, should have seen it coming when the only surprising thing about it was she hadn’t asked before. “They saw you with Omi,” he said, because he had to say something and half a truth was better than a hasty lie. “If we’re involved, we need to know what with.”  
“Involved?” Moth echoed. “Well… I suppose that’s true.” She twisted her fingers in her hair, twining it so tight about her forefinger the fingertip showed crimson, tugging at it hard enough to hurt; she worried at her lip, she forced herself to meet his eyes again. “I’m sorry, Aya-san! If I’d known… I mean, I never wanted Omi… he’s just a kid, I would have never— Y-you’re not mad?”  
“It’s not your fault.” 

She started. For a long moment Moth simply gazed at him in incomprehension, almost as if she hadn’t heard him at all – then her hands stilled as relief flooded into her eyes, her shoulders slumped as she exhaled, letting out a breath he hadn’t realized she had been holding. A smile, clumsy and genuine, illuminated her face and, for a heartbeat, she was simply beautiful. Somehow, he’d said the right thing after all.

This, Aya thought, could be a problem.  
____  
  
It was fast, and it was ugly.

There’d been a shout, and there’d been light in his eyes, and then there’d been nothing at all. In the space between two heartbeats, the stranger had – he had moved. Shinobu had barely had the time to realize that the guard was there before he was doubled over on the flagstones, gasping and writhing like the proverbial landed fish and the man from the basement had just kept on coming: the fingers in the hair; the foot to the ribs; one, two, three—

It had been fast and it had been ugly but most of all it had been efficient, designed to do nothing but – but deal with the problem. To take the guard down as quick as possible, to make double damn sure he wouldn’t be getting back up. Shinobu had watched, could do nothing but watch with his hands to his mouth, the breath catching in his throat, and he was starting to understand what the stranger was doing here. How it was they had found him, why the President had wanted him locked away. Hard at it was to watch him… well, watch him _work_ , it still made a certain kind of sense of him – at least, up to a point.

And then he spat a curse and turned to run, and that was where it ended: he’d already left it behind.

(Who _was_ this man? What in the world, Shinobu wondered, was the President tangling with?)

The really crazy thing was the stranger waited for him. He ran too far and too fast: for a moment, stood at a flood-lit intersection between two shoebox-shaped outbuildings and staring into nothing at all, shoulders heaving as he caught his breath, Shinobu thought they’d lost one another completely. He might almost have left him to it, turned round and walked back to the main block, if it hadn’t been for the desperate throb of the stranger’s panic, too close at hand and far too strong to turn his back on. Of course he knew the last thing he should have been doing was leading him back to – to wherever it was he had come from, and yet…

It’s him or me, Shinobu reminded himself, and he belongs somewhere else. I don’t.

Someone hissed, thin and brittle: half-hidden in the shadows, his back pressed against the brushed-concrete wall of the further of the two buildings, the young man gestured desperately to him.

“Don’t just stand there!”  
He shouldn’t just have nodded and gone to join him, slipping quick and neat into the shadows. The problem was the taste, stale and metallic, of the young man’s terror, and of his desperate longing for home. It was dark in the lee of the building, far too dark for detail, but  Shinobu searched for his companion’s face all the same. “Why did you do that?”  
“Do you think I liked it? They’re not just gonna let me stroll out of here!”  
There was nothing to say to that. Certainly there was no way to deny it. “Did you want to kill him?”  
“He’ll live,” the stranger said. “Couple of busted ribs. Bastard of a headache. But he’ll live.” 

Shinobu swallowed. He nodded. He didn’t like to ask how the young man knew.

“Kid? How big is this goddamn place?”  
He shouldn’t have smiled. Should never have want to reassure him. It shouldn’t have mattered how he left, as long as he was gone for good – if anyone deserved to be down there in the first place, this man was it. At least he knew why they wanted him… “We’re nearly there,” Shinobu said. Then, “Can you drive?”  
“Sure. Just get me to a car. I’ll do the rest.”  
“You’ll go?”  
The stranger nodded, just that. “I’ll go.” 

It was never that easy, of course.

He felt them before he saw them. The sawing of nerves stretched taut, an admixture of excitement and balked fear, the pride and sure, clear focus of a man doing his job well— then the barking of dogs, the yawp and crackle of walkie-talkies; the crisp, clipped tones of Nakayama calling to his men. The car park was lit up like Christmas in the city, swarming with men in peaked caps and warm-up jackets, with dogs yelping and surging and dancing at the end of their leashes. Nakayama, sturdy and sure, stood at the center of it all, gesturing to his men, issuing orders: dealing with the problem.

Shinobu held out one hand, we’ve got company, and the young man stopped dead in his tracks, darting for cover behind a stand of shrubbery: there was nothing to do but follow his lead. The stranger dropped to the ground, lay so still and so silent that, for a time, Shinobu could almost fancy that he was asleep, or perhaps unconscious. It must have been well over a minute before, carefully, he raised his head, eyes darting from side to side as he gazed out across the busy car park.

Maybe it was the sight of the dogs that had him catch his breath, or maybe it was Nakayama: whatever it was, he had reached a conclusion. He shook his head, as if to clear it, he pushed himself back to his knees, he reached beneath the bushes for – for what? Shinobu sat back on his heels, he watched in incomprehension as the young man rubbed something onto his cheeks, his brow. Earth, he realized after a moment, from the flowerbed they knelt in.

He was focused; he was calm. That calm, sudden and eerie, was the most unsettling thing of all.

The young man’s hands stilled. He looked down at his arms. “Well, fuck,” he muttered, and raised his manacled wrists, holding them out to him. “Sorry. Can you do my arms?”  
“Your arms?”  
The stranger nodded. “Look,” he said, “I need to stay hidden, okay? My clothes are dark so that’s no problem, but my skin’s gonna catch the light. Here—” He reached down, poured a handful of damp soil into Shinobu’s cupped hands. “Just rub it onto my arms. I’d do it myself, only…” 

Only he can’t reach. Shinobu didn’t have to ask if he was serious. He leaned forward, he rubbed mud down the length of his companion’s arms, from shoulder to wrist and he could, he realized with a sudden nervous thrill that was all his own, have stood up any moment. Could call to Nakayama and his men, _he’s over here_ , could tell them anything at all, let them drag the stranger off and hope they simply shot him: he could never have done anything of the sort.

Funny how this ridiculous, weirdly intimate act simply seemed like the next thing to do. It was as if, having brought this man so far, it would have been silly not to finish the job. We both need him out of here. Why not his way?

“What’s your name?” the stranger said.  
He nearly didn’t answer – then he thought, what’s the harm? Whoever this man was, he’d seen quite enough already. What could one last detail do? “Shinobu.”  
“Shinobu.” The man from the basement attempted to grin. “Hi. I’m Ken.” 

He had always been far too human: that was what had brought them here and where they both got stuck. He was dark as Shinobu was pale. He had a west coast accent. His feet were bare; he was frightened and exhausted, and ill. His name was Ken. He wanted to go home.

It was such a small thing to want.

“All right,” he said, because the silence demanded filling. “You’re okay from here?”  
Ken, all his attention on the road ahead, nodded once. “I’m good,” he said, and he was talking to someone else: then he raised his head, his eyes found Shinobu’s face, and he gave the smile one last shot. “Thanks, I guess.”  
Quite in spite of himself, Shinobu felt himself smile back. He heard himself say, “Good luck.”

Ken nodded once. He uncoiled himself from the undergrowth, knees bent and head held low, tense and expectant as a surgeon in the moment before the first incision. His hand, just for a moment, brushed against the curve of Shinobu’s shoulder. It might have been all he could think of to do.

And then, just like that, he had gone. 

You could stand up. You could still warn them. You don’t owe him anything.

Unmoving, scarcely daring to breathe, Shinobu crouched beneath the bushes in the flowerbed, his grimy fingernails digging into his mud-smeared palms. Waiting: he hardly knew for what. He didn’t even know where he should be looking. Nakayama barked an order; a flashlight beam swung wildly over his hiding-place, then up and away and heavy boots clattered on the tarmac as a brace of guards hurried past – and they might easily have seen him, if only they’d known it was him they were looking for.

A minute ticked by, then two – maybe, by now, it had been as many as five. Was that Ken’s fear he felt, or something else entirely? Once, out of the corner of his eye, Shinobu thought he saw something stir—

“Nakayama!”

 _Winters_.

Winters, his sandy hair tousled and his shoelaces untied, pulling a heavy leather jacket over a winded gray tee-shirt he’d never normally have been caught conscious in. His fury blazed bright amongst the chaos of the guards’ swirling emotions, cut clear through Nakayama’s easy confidence – shot through, now, with threads of unease. Damn it, where _is_ this kid?

“When did you plan on letting me know about this problem?”  
Nakayama bristled. Resenting the incursion on his domain. “As soon as it was resolved.”  
“Re _solved_?” If Winters could have got away with catching him by the shirt front, spitting his words right in Nakayama’s face, he would have done. His hands, hanging uselessly by his sides, were twisted into claws. “The kid is gone!”  
“Everyone who needed to know was informed immediately.”  
“Did you tell the President?”  
“The President is at home,” Nakayama said tightly. “I believe the American went with her…”  
“Sir?”

Nakayama turned: a guard was jogging over to him, burning bright with excitement and frustration. A sleek, muscular German Shepherd bounded by his side, straining at its leash and barking wildly at a row of parked cars

“What do you think that sound was?” 

And Shinobu knew what he had to do next. Otherwise, this had all been for nothing, less than nothing. _He’s got to go…_ He stood. Mud on his hands, his clothing, his hair snared and tangled by the branches of the bushes, Shinobu got to his feet, he stared straight at Nakayama and his men, his jaw set and his hands curled into fists – to keep them from trembling. It was me. You heard me.

“Shinobu?” Nakayama took a pace forward, confusion – Shinobu couldn’t see it, but he could feel it so plain he knew it must be showing – clear on his face. “What are you—”  
Winters cut him off. “Was all this your doing?”  
“What do you think?” Shinobu asked. He stepped from the flower bed, brushing the dirt from his palms. He felt, for a moment, nothing but calm, and knew it could belong to nobody but him: Winters’ fury was an irrelevance. “He didn’t belong here.”  
“Didn’t belong—” Winters shook his head in disgust, he gave Shinobu a look that was supposed to make him cringe. The boy met it head-on. Go ahead. Hate me. Because that’s all you can do. “So you simply let him leave?”  
“I was tired of him.” 

He turned. He made to walk away: a flurry of motion, the sound of hurrying feet and Winters was upon him, catching him by the arm and spinning him bodily around. Shinobu winced, he tried almost instinctively to pull away. Up close the white man smelled bad, a rank, intensely human odor clinging to him, the scent of yesterday’s sweat; his anger swept over the both of them. It left Shinobu dizzy, it left him reckless and bold, and when Winters bent to spit his words directly in his face, his breath coming hot and stale against his turned cheek, it was all the boy could do not to rear back and punch him.

“Listen here, child. You went too far this time. This had nothing to do with you!”  
“Didn’t it?” Shinobu retorted; Winters’ anger transfigured him, blazing just as bright and fierce in the boy as it would have been in Winters himself. “You can’t have forgotten why I’m here!”  
“That is no excuse for what you did!”  
“Tell that to the President!”

Winters’ eyes narrowed, his fingers tightened about Shinobu’s arm: he could at least make the boy hurt. He raised one hand, rearing back as if to strike him – and Nakayama stepped forward, caught him by the wrist, ice-cold where Winters burned. I can’t let you do that, Winters. Stop.

“He’s right, David,” Nakayama said quietly. “She deals with him. It’s up to her what happens to him now.”  
“That’s absurd!” Winters snapped: but his grip slackened, fingers slipping from about Shinobu’s arms as, reluctantly, he stepped back. “Well, for Christ’s sake, what are we supposed to do with the boy tonight?”  
“Nothing,” Nakayama said. Then, when Winters seemed about to protest, he sighed. Said, “He’s not going anywhere. She can deal with him later. Tomorrow. For now, we—” 

The roar of an engine, the slam of a door. Winters turned, and Nakayama, almost as one: they turned just in time to see one of the parked cars lurch suddenly and violently forward, headlights snapping on as it shot toward the gates – straight toward one of the watching guards, stood frozen in shock. The man just about had time to throw himself out of the way as the car tore past him and through the gates, tires screeching, headed straight for anywhere at all, as long as it was somewhere else.

We have a bigger problem, Nakayama might have been about to say, but that was only too obvious.

Winters turned on him, catching him by the shirt front, all but dragging the boy from his feet. Spat a mouthful of furious English over him then when Shinobu, riding the current of his fury, didn’t so much as blink, he pushed him angrily away, pitching him clean off his feet – sending him stumbling straight into Nakayama. “Get him out of my sight!”  
“But he’ll still be here tomorrow,” Nakayama said quietly.  
“Right,” Winters ran one hand through his hair, he cast a wild-eyed gaze at everything and nothing. “Right. Boy, do you have any idea what you’ve just done?!”  
“It doesn’t matter,” Shinobu said. “Just don’t bring him back.”  
____  
  
It couldn’t have been that simple.

Four days. Four days Ken had sat there and dreamed of an exit, and in the end all it came down to was pissing off the right creepy child. Four days over nothing more than a quick stroll through some stupid fucking science fair and a few minutes buried under a dashboard doing a number on someone else’s steering column that – thanks again Ryou, you poor stupid bastard, and for what little it’s worth to a dead man _I’m so goddamn sorry_ – he could have done blindfold and half asleep, and damn near had at that…

Jesus Christ but Schuldig had done him a favor by leaving him so fucked-up and miserable that Shinobu kid couldn’t bear to be around him. He’d done him a fucking favor. Now tell yourself that doesn’t stick in your throat.

But he’d had to think harder about how to handle the fucking tolls and even there he’d just got lucky! 

It’s too easy. It’s too damn easy. They won’t just let you leave.

Christ it was cold. Fucking freezing actually, should have done the passenger side, but if the slipstream from the busted window was good for nothing else it was at least serving to keep him awake.

(Except it wasn’t good enough, or it wouldn’t be for too much longer – Ken hadn’t let himself know it, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. There’d been that dicey moment in Kawasaki, where a head rush or a dizzy spell, or falling asleep or blacking out for a second or who the fuck even knew at this stage had seen him damn near driving straight into the path of a truck: thank God the driver’s frantic horn work had snapped him the fuck out of it again, or who knew what might have happened next—)

That one car had been up his ass since the tolls and good luck shaking anybody on a road this wide and this flat! Might even have been there earlier, Christ knew he hadn’t been paying any fucking attention to anything but the fucking signs and thank whichever saint you went to at times like this you could be in bloody Aomori and everyone and their dog would still want to know which way it was to Tokyo. It didn’t look like much, just another aging Corolla except this one’s in blue but then who’d have thought that mad scientists had any time for the Nissan March? Shit, and wouldn’t it just have to have been fucking green, why not black or silver or something partway – partway goddamn discreet?

Could have been worse. Could have been red. For Christ’s sake, you asshole, get _off_ my fucking _tail_!

Jesus Mary and Joseph, what the Hell had he been thinking? What kind of idiot, with an entire car park to choose from, ended up fleeing for his fucking life in a fucking Nissan March? A green one, for God’s sake! It wasn’t even as if it liked going fast, the entire goddamn thing started acting like it wanted to shake itself to bits and the wheel was so uninvolved with the road he might as well have been playing fucking _Ridge Racer_. Why hadn’t he stolen that bloody Corolla and whose _car_ was this, anyway? Christ, he hoped it was Winters’s!

God damn it but Ken had his foot through the bloody floor and all the bastard on his tail had to do was cruise gently on down behind him and wait. Maybe he could break the speed limit with a tail wind and a steep enough hill…

(If only he could have done. The cops would be safety of a sort.)

Shibuya. They’re signing for Shibuya – he’s close enough, now, that Tokyo’s too big a target. Ken caught himself thinking of home, thinking that just maybe it might be possible after all. He could leave the expressway. Could lose himself in the city streets, lose the Corolla: one light change would do it, trapping his pursuer in a file of stalled and grumbling traffic while the March slipped home free. Greenery whipped past one window while, through the other, the headlights of cars split the shadows. Shibuya, Ken thought, then, lane change. What, now? How the Hell did he do that? Christ, what the Hell _lane_ was he meant to be in?!

Ken remembered swinging the wheel, that damn stupid unresponsive piece of crap arcade machine bullshit wheel. Remembered dropping out of lane. Remembered looking behind him, just for a moment: hey, Corolla guy, you still with me?

The next thing he knew his eyes were snapping open on a sea of churning green, as the car spun crazily out of control.

 _Whoa_ —

And no time for anything else.

When the world stopped cartwheeling about him, when the car shuddered to an abrupt and final stop – sudden pain as his seatbelt caught him hard across shoulder and chest, the back of his head striking the seat – Ken was staring at a tree trunk, and he… no, the car was on its side. His right arm was pinned painfully beneath him, an acrid and all-too-familiar smell hung in the air. Dazed and blinking and stupid with shock, all he was thinking was _oh_ —

Hidaka? That’s gas.

Ken didn’t remember struggling free of the seatbelt. Didn’t recall kicking the windshield until it broke, or sliding down the bonnet to land on all fours in the mud. He didn’t remember the explosion, the shock wave that blew him from his feet, running blindly from the flaming wreck and slithering and falling down a slope to God knew where. He knew he must have done all those things, because the next thing he knew with any certainty was lying in the dirt beneath a carefully curated shrub, with the heat from the fire at his back…

Later. He’d worry about the rest of it later.

For now, Ken figured he’d close his eyes.  
  
  
_  _to be continued_


End file.
